Mastering a few techniques will help you supercharge your whiteboard experience. Hopefully these quick tips will let you use techniques most suitable to your laptop/desktop/tablet/phone setups.
While all actions have icons to click or tap on, it is fastest to use gestures. So let’s talk about gestures first.
Draw — Left click and drag your finger or mouse. For greater control, use both hands. Click with a left hand finger, hold down, and draw with your right hand finger. On laptops that don’t support multiple finger detection, tapping with a finger and then dragging should work.
Erase — On multi-touch trackpads, click with two fingers and drag. Clicking with two fingers activates the eraser. The pen radius increases to indicate the eraser is active. On older laptops with trackpads and left+right buttons, hold down both buttons and drag to erase.
Type Text — Position the mouse pointer where you want the text to be and start typing.
Selection — Double click on drawing lines to select items. Selection brings up an in-place menu for actions like Delete, Move and even transformations like Animate, Resize and Rotate.
Scroll — Multi-touch trackpad two finger scroll should work for both horizontal and vertical directions. Some browsers may display scroll bars for normal use as well.
Pasting Images — Copy an image using Ctrl-C (Cmd-C on Mac) and paste into the whiteboard using Ctrl-V (Cmd-V on Mac).
With the gestures out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the menu bar icons. The menu bar is normally a list of icons but can be expanded using the “hamburger” icon on the top left.
The Select control is helpful in touch devices to enter select mode. Mouse and trackpads can be used to double click to select.
The Upload File control lets you select a file to paste into the board. The pasted file appears immediately on remote viewers of the same board. JPEG, PNG, SVG files are support. Your mileage may vary for other formats.
The Erase tool puts the cursor in erase mode. The Erase icon changes to a Draw icon to let you return back to Draw mode. A two finger click when in Erase mode also returns back to Draw mode.
The Text option allows text entry after clicking on the canvas. After entering text and pressing enter, the tool goes back to drawing mode.
The Line mode allows users to click to specify a starting point, then move the mouse and click again to specify and end point. A straight line is drawn between these points. The tool stays in Line mode after drawing a line. The Line option changes to Draw when in Line mode. Selecting Draw returns to freehand drawing mode.
The Lasso tool is for selecting multiple items at the same time. Select the tool then click on the canvas to drag an area around the items to select. Only items completely inside the scribed area get selected. The in-place dropdown menu is displayed on completion of lasso. Upon completion of actions after lasso the tool returns back to Draw mode.
That covers annotation tools; let’s go over actions to manage this whiteboard next.
The Clear option erases the whole board for you and all collaborators / viewers. Easiest way to start from scratch.
The Download selection prepares a PDF file of the board and downloads to your device.
The Delete Forever option clears the board and discards it completely. It will no longer be reachable from the manage boards pages either.
You may have noticed the “Animate Rotate” and “Animate Options” in the in-place menu while selecting items. These animations can be Paused using the Pause Animations button. This button changes to Play, to allow for resuming animations. Animations can be resume also via the select drop-down menu.
And there you go, these actions will help you teach and collaborate with whiteboard.chat becoming a natural way to express your thoughts.
Please also refer to our other articles to help you Manage your collections of boards and use variety of advanced features like setting up video sessions!
Thanks for using whiteboard.chat!
