Whiteboards

Sketch is the Magic Suite whiteboard. It gives you an endless canvas for drawing, sticky notes, text, shapes and images, and it saves boards as ordinary files in your Magic Suite storage, alongside your reports and everything else. Boards exported from Microsoft Whiteboard open in it directly.

A board is a single file with a .whiteboard.svg name. It lives in a folder like any other file, so it can be renamed, moved, copied, shared and backed up in the ways you already know.

Creating a board

Boards are created from the Files app.

1. Open Files and go to the folder you want the board in.
2. Right-click an empty part of the file list to open the New menu.
3. Choose New Whiteboard.

A board called New Whiteboard.whiteboard.svg appears in the folder. If that name is taken, the next one is numbered, so you never overwrite a board by accident. Rename it as you would any other file.

Note: creating a board does not open it. The new board is empty until you open it and start working.

Opening a board

Double-click any .whiteboard.svg file in Files. The board opens in the Sketch editor with everything on it.

Boards can also be started without a file at all: go straight to the Sketch editor for a scratch board. Nothing is saved until you choose where to put it.

Boards from Microsoft Whiteboard

Boards exported from Microsoft Whiteboard open directly. Their ink, sticky notes, text, images and reaction stamps are all recognised, so you can carry on working rather than starting again.

Those boards are kept exactly as they were exported until you change something, so opening one and closing it again never alters it.

Moving around the canvas

The canvas has no edges. You can keep going in any direction and the board grows with you.

To do this	Do this
Move around	Drag an empty part of the canvas, or hold Space and drag
Zoom	Scroll, or pinch on a touch screen
Zoom to a percentage	The plus and minus buttons, bottom right
See the whole board	Fit to screen, bottom right

Zoom runs from 10% to 400%. The current level is shown between the zoom buttons.

Drawing

Sketch has several pens, a highlighter, an arrow pen and an eraser. Choose one from the toolbar and draw on the canvas.

Tool	What it does
Pens	Draw in the pen's colour and width. With a pen or stylus, pressing harder gives a thicker line.
Highlighter	A flat, semi-transparent stroke for marking up what is already there.
Arrow	Turns each stroke you draw into an arrow.
Eraser	Removes what you rub over.

Each pen has its own colour and width, chosen from the palette that appears when the pen is selected, so you can keep several pens set up and switch between them.

Straightening what you draw

A pen tidies up shapes as you draw them: a rough circle becomes a circle, a rough box becomes a rectangle. Hold Shift while drawing for a straight line.

The highlighter and the arrow pen do not do this, because a highlighter is used to mark up what is already on the board and the arrow pen already knows what it is drawing.

Erasing

The eraser has two modes. The stroke eraser removes a whole stroke when you touch it. The point eraser removes only the part you rub over, splitting the stroke and leaving the rest, which is what you want when a long line is right except for one corner.

Note: on boards imported from Microsoft Whiteboard, erasing always removes the whole stroke. Those boards do not carry the detail a point eraser needs, and cannot be re-exported to add it.

Sticky notes

Choose the sticky note tool and click the canvas. A note appears and opens for typing straight away.

Notes come in eight colours, chosen from the palette beside the tool. They can be resized by dragging a corner, and the text grows and shrinks with the note so a small note is never left with three words in a huge face.

Formatting a note

Notes understand a small amount of Markdown while you type:

**bold**
*italic*
- a bullet
- another bullet

What you typed is what you edit. Opening a note again shows the Markdown you wrote, not the formatted result, so your bold, italic and bullets survive being edited and being saved.

Press Tab when you finish a note to confirm it and start the next one beside it, which is the quickest way to get a row of notes down.

Text boxes

Choose the text tool and click the canvas, or double-click an empty part of the canvas.

Text boxes take rich text: bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, a font, a size from 8 to 96pt, a colour, and left, centre or right alignment. The box grows to fit what you type. A web address you type becomes a link.

You can paste into a text box from a web page or a document and keep the basic formatting. Anything a board cannot safely hold is dropped from the paste rather than carried onto the board.

Shapes

The shapes tool offers rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, triangles, parallelograms, cylinders and clouds, and arrows in single, double, curved and elbow styles.

Each shape has its own fill colour and its own outline colour and width. Drag the handles to resize, hold Shift to keep the proportions, and use the rotation handle to turn it. Type while a shape is selected to put a label inside it.

Connector lines attach to the anchor points on a shape and stay attached when the shape moves, so a diagram keeps its meaning when you rearrange it. Shapes snap to the grid and to each other as you drag them.

Images

Put an image on the board in whichever way suits you:

• drag a file from your computer onto the canvas
• paste from the clipboard
• use the image tool to pick a file

PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and SVG are all accepted. Images resize from their handles, keeping their proportions, and can be rotated.

Tip: images are stored inside the board file, so a board with many large images becomes a large file. If a board is getting heavy, see Where boards are saved below.

Reactions and voting

The reactions tool places a stamp on the board: thumbs up, heart, star, tick, cross, question mark, fire, lightbulb, or an emoji of your choosing.

Click an existing stamp to add one to its count, which is how a group votes on a board without anyone having to tally anything up.

Selecting and arranging

Choose the select tool, the arrow at the left of the toolbar, then:

To do this	Do this
Select one thing	Click it
Add to or remove from the selection	Shift-click
Select several at once	Drag a rectangle around them
Select everything	Ctrl+A
Clear the selection	Click an empty part of the canvas

A rectangle selects what it encloses completely, not everything it touches, so a large selection on a busy board is still accurate.

Selected items are outlined, and a selection of more than one also shows the box around the whole group. That box is what alignment and distribution work from.

Moving a selection

Drag any item in the selection and the whole selection moves with it. Hold Shift while dragging to snap to the board's grid. The arrow keys nudge the selection, and Shift with an arrow key moves it ten times as far.

The arrange toolbar

While something is selected, a second toolbar appears with everything you can do to it.

Action	What it does
Align	Lines up left edges, horizontal centres, right edges, top edges, vertical middles or bottom edges, against the selection's own box.
Distribute	Evens out the gaps between three or more items, horizontally or vertically. The outermost two stay where they are.
Bring to front, forward, backward, to back	Moves the selection through the stack, keeping a multiple selection in its own order.
Group and ungroup	Makes several items behave as one, and separates them again.
Delete	Removes the selection.

Distribution evens out the visible gaps rather than the positions, which is what you want when the items are different sizes: evenly spaced centres look wrong when one item is much wider than the rest.

Copy, cut and paste work on a selection with the usual keys. A pasted copy lands slightly offset from the original and is selected, ready to drag where you want it. Copies are independent, so editing one never changes the other.

Undo and redo

Ctrl+Z undoes and Ctrl+Y redoes, and the toolbar has buttons for both. The history covers the whole session, so you can step back a long way.

Everything is undoable: adding, deleting, moving, resizing, rotating, changing a colour, editing text, and grouping and ungrouping. Actions that feel like one thing count as one: dragging six notes together takes one undo, not six, and grouping several items takes one undo to reverse.

How the board looks

The settings button, bottom right, controls the board's own appearance.

Setting	What it does
Background	A colour for the board, from the choices offered or one you pick.
Grid	Lines, dots or nothing. The grid is what Shift snaps to while you drag.
Lighten ink for a dark background	Makes dark ink readable when the board is a dark colour, without changing the ink itself.

These settings belong to the board, so everyone who opens it sees it the same way.

Saving

There is no Save button. A changed board saves itself every few seconds, and the editor tells you when it last saved.

Leaving the page finishes whatever has not been written yet, whether you navigate away inside Magic Suite or close the tab, so work is not lost by walking away from it.

Templates

The templates gallery offers a starting point rather than an empty board, filtered by Brainstorming, Retrospective, Planning, Education, Design, or Blank.

• Blank board
• Brainstorm, a grid of sticky notes with swim lanes
• Sprint retrospective, with went well, improve and actions
• Kanban, with backlog, to do, in progress and done
• Mind map, a central idea with branches
• Compare and contrast, as a Venn diagram
• Weekly planner

Each shows a preview. Use template creates a new board from it, and the original template is not touched.

Managing your boards

The board list shows your boards as cards with a thumbnail, the title, when it was last changed, how many things are on it, and where it is stored.

From there you can create a board, rename one by clicking its title, duplicate one, delete one, and import a .whiteboard.svg from your computer. Search by title, and sort by last modified, created, title or size.

Sharing a board with people who do not use Magic Suite

A board exports as:

• PNG, at normal or double resolution, for pasting into a document or a chat
• PDF, split across pages when the board is larger than a page
• .whiteboard.svg, the full board with everything on it, for someone else to open in Sketch

You can export the whole board or only the part you are looking at, which is the quicker way to share one corner of a large board.

Where boards are saved

A board can be saved to your Magic Suite storage or to a connected location such as OneDrive, SharePoint, SFTP or Git.

Boards in Magic Suite storage count towards your organisation's storage allowance. Boards in a connected location do not, so a connected location is the better home for large boards.

The editor shows the board's size, and warns when a board is getting big. If your organisation is out of storage, saving to Magic Suite storage is blocked and you are offered a connected location instead, or an upgrade. Your board stays open and unchanged while you decide, and nothing on it is lost.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? for this list at any time.

Key	What it does
P, H, E	Pen, highlighter, eraser
S, T, N, I	Shapes, text, sticky note, image
Escape	Clear the selection, or put the current tool down
Space and drag	Move around the canvas
Ctrl+plus, Ctrl+minus, Ctrl+0	Zoom in, zoom out, fit to screen
Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y	Undo, redo
Ctrl+A	Select everything
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V	Copy, cut, paste
Ctrl+G, Ctrl+Shift+G	Group, ungroup
Delete or Backspace	Delete the selection
Arrow keys	Nudge the selection, ten times as far with Shift

The canvas and its contents can be reached with the Tab key, tools announce themselves to a screen reader as you change them, and the editor follows your high-contrast setting.

Note: while you are typing in a note or a text box, the keys above type. Delete deletes letters, not the board.