Read this to gain a basic understanding of the app's design so you can set up your workspace and navigate more effectively.

Workspace

A workspace is the top-level concept in Outline, everything belongs to a workspace and most organizations will use a single workspace for everything. Workspaces are also where billing, audit logs, and user access is organized.

A workspace will have many Collections within it. By default, when you sign-up we create a welcome Collection with some example documents and content, you can delete or rename this once some real content has been created.

Collection

Collections are for organizing and grouping your documents together. They work best when organized around a topic or internal company team, for example Company Policies or Engineering.

Collections also act as a permissions boundary, as an admin it is possible to choose which team members have access and whether they are able to edit documents inside.

Document

Ah, finally – the document. Documents are where you will spend most of your time in Outline. They should feel familiar if you’ve used other modern text editing tools.

Documents can be nested to create trees of related information and can act like a folder, containing other related documents.

Template

Templates act like documents however they can also include placeholders that behave as input fields when used to create new documents. You can create templates for things like meeting notes, PRD’s or help content that you want to keep in a similar format.