Finding your way around

Plank keeps everything in three simple places: a sidebar down one side for moving between your different kinds of work, a file viewer in the middle for reading and editing documents, and a search at the top for jumping straight to what you need. Once you know these three, you know the app.

The sidebar

The sidebar is your way around. Each section gathers one kind of thing.

• Files — your documents and folders. This is the main area, where your work lives.
• Starred — files you've pinned for quick access, so the ones you reach for often are always a click away. Newly starred files go to the top, and you can drag a file by the handle on its right to put the list in whatever order suits you. Right-click a starred file for Move Up and Move Down if you'd rather not drag.
• Skills — reusable capabilities you've added for your assistant to draw on. This section appears when the matching beta feature is turned on. See Skills and Beta features.
• Integrations — outside tools and services you've connected, so the assistant can work with them. See Integrations.
• Automations — schedules and triggers that let the assistant act on its own, without you starting each task by hand. See Automations.
• Activity — a running list of recent file changes, so you can see at a glance what's been happening.

At the very bottom, pinned so it never scrolls out of sight, is What Plank can do — a catalogue of ready-made scenarios covering personal work, team coordination in Telegram, sales, projects, finance, operations and more. Each one comes with a prompt you can send as-is: open a scenario, press Run, and it lands in your chat box ready for you to review and send. Nothing is sent on your behalf.

Settings lives separately — it isn't part of the file tree. You'll find it on its own, away from your documents. The same catalogue lives there too, under Use cases, where you can search it and filter by area or by how much setup a scenario needs.

Undoing a mistake — Cmd/Ctrl + Z

Renamed the wrong file, dragged something into the wrong folder, or created a file or folder you didn't mean to? Press Cmd/Ctrl + Z. Plank asks you to confirm — naming exactly what it's about to put back — and then reverses that last file operation.

Pressing it again reaches further back, one operation at a time, for as long as you've had the tab open.

Deleting a file can't be undone. If the last thing you did was delete something, Cmd/Ctrl + Z tells you plainly that deletion can't be reversed, rather than quietly undoing whatever you did before the delete — that would be more surprising than doing nothing at all. Press it again to keep going back to the operation before that.

Cmd/Ctrl + Z only reaches for file operations in the sidebar. While you're typing in the file viewer or in a chat, it undoes your typing instead, the way it does in any text field.

The file viewer

The middle of the app is where files open. The viewer handles most everyday document types directly, so you rarely need to download anything just to look at it.

It can open PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, images, HTML dashboards, CSV files, Markdown, and code right in your browser. Excel spreadsheets show their sheets as a table — pick a cell to see its value or the formula behind it. For other Office and iWork files (PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, Keynote), preview happens on your phone through its built-in viewer; on a computer you'll see a "Preview not available for this file type" message with the option to download the file instead.

A few things you can do once a file is open:

• View / Edit — a toggle to switch between reading a file and making changes to it.
• Version History — look back at earlier versions of a file, so nothing is ever truly lost.
• Interactive checklists — in Markdown files, ticking a checkbox updates the file itself, not just the view.
• Refresh — reload the file you're looking at to pull in the latest changes, without closing the tab or reopening it.
• Chat about this file — the speech-bubble button starts a new chat with this file already attached to your message. Nothing is sent: you write the question yourself, and the assistant knows which file you mean.

The viewer also refreshes itself when you switch back to a tab after the assistant has edited that file, so you'll rarely need to reach for the button — it's there so you can confirm you're looking at the latest version whenever you want to be sure.

Working with several files at once

You can keep more than one file open at a time using tabs. Up to five are visible across the top; any beyond that tuck into an "Open tabs" menu. Inside a context, each tab is labelled with the workspace it came from, so you always know which file belongs where.

Download and share

Every file can be downloaded, or shared with others through a public link — see Sharing. On computers, PDFs, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets preview right in the browser; PowerPoint and iWork files download instead. On phones, opening a file brings up your device's own native preview and share options, which cover the full set.

HTML dashboards can be more than something to read — they can be interactive, opening other files and running actions for you right from the page. See HTML buttons & dashboards.

Search — the Command Palette

To find something fast, open the Command Palette. You can open it from the search icon in the header, or with the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl + P.

It searches chats and files at once — start typing and the list shows both groups: chats first, files under them (the box reads "Search chats and files..."). Type a "/" to run commands instead, such as switching workspace, opening settings, or toggling between light and dark.

Chats are found by what was said in them, not by a title — an ordinary chat does not have one, and the list labels it with your first message. So search with words you actually wrote: "invoice", "August statement", "reconciliation". Under the chat's name you see the matching piece of text with the words highlighted, so you can tell whether it is the right conversation before opening it.

It's worth knowing what search does and doesn't reach:

• Files are found by name and path — not by what's written inside them.
• Chats are found by message text — yours and the assistant's replies. When the match is in a reply, the row says so: "In the answer:".
• Chat search reaches back to late July 2026. Older conversations are not in it, and that is not a setting you can turn on — the text of those chats was never stored anywhere.
• In a workspace's shared chat you will find your own messages and the replies to them, but not a colleague's messages.
• Search covers the current workspace. To search another one, switch to it first.
• You need at least two characters.

If you remember a file's name, search is the quickest way there. And if you're trying to remember where the assistant did something, you can now search the words from the conversation itself — or look in your chats and in Activity.