Home is the page the Explorer opens on, and the first row of its sidebar, above the Inbox and the Timeline. It answers the two questions you bring back with you, on one screen: what was I working on? and what happened while I was away?
Home opens with a greeting across the top of the page. Under it, two pills say how many documents you have and whether anything waits in your Inbox; click one to go there. The search field sits right there in the greeting, with New Document inside it, so the first screen always offers a way to find something or start something. On a wide screen a Slide Deck, an Event Poster and a Year in Review fan out beside it: a glimpse of what a document can hold.
Prefer a plainer Home? Press the × beside Help in the greeting's corner to hide it. Home then opens with its title and the search field in the header, like every other page, and stays that way on your other devices. Turn it back on in Settings > Documents with Show Home Banner.
Your first visit looks different. With nothing made yet, Home welcomes you and offers ways to start instead: the search field looks through the templates, Start Blank offers the blank Pages templates, and below it sit the most popular templates, each one click from a new document. If you have used livedocuments before and see nothing, Sign In brings your documents back. Once you have a document, Home shows your work instead.
Below the greeting, Home is one column: Jump Back In, then Shared With You Recently, then What Happened, each with its link at the right of its heading.
Jump Back In
Jump Back In holds eight documents within reach: the four you used most, then the four you used last.
- Most Used counts the days you opened, edited or made a document over the last 90 days. A document you open most days stays put; one glance does not push it aside.
- The last ones are the documents you opened, edited or made most recently, newest first.
- What you make is in at once, opened or not: a new document, a duplicate, a single imported document, or one an AI tool made for you. An import of several documents at once is the exception, so a big import never pushes your work aside; those join when you first open one.
- A document is never shown twice: if one of the last ones is also among the most used, it stays with the most used, and the next most recent takes its place.
On a computer or a tablet they sit as cards in two groups: Most Used first, with a line under each saying on how many days you used it, then Recent, saying when you last used each. On a phone they share one strip you scroll sideways, taking turns, and the strip ends in a See More tile.
Each document shows a picture of what is drawn on it, with its name underneath; click one to open it. A document saved only in this browser wears the This Browser pill and takes its place like any other, counted in this browser. Documents in the Trash, and ones whose share link has lapsed or whose team you have left, never appear. With nothing yet to show, the section says "The documents you use most and last will gather here."
Opening a document is private: it counts towards your own Jump Back In, and nobody else ever sees that you opened it.
See More opens Recent: the 12 documents you opened most recently, newest first, with the same filters as the rest of the Explorer. Its breadcrumb leads back to Home.
Shared With You Recently
Under Jump Back In sit the four items most recently shared with you through a link. See All opens Shared With Me.
What Happened
Below Jump Back In, What Happened lists what other people did to documents you can open in the last 14 days, under day headings (Today, Yesterday, then the date): comments and replies, threads resolved, a day of edits, actions assigned or completed, and documents shared into one of your teams. Each entry says who did it, what they did, which document, and where it lives (its team or My Work, then its folder, or Shared by and the owner), and opens the document when you click it. When nobody else has done anything in that time, Home leaves the section out, and See More and See Timeline only show once there is something to follow.
"Documents you can open" means your own, your teams', and those shared with you through a link that still works. A link that only reaches one tab adds nothing here.
When several people worked on the same document on the same day, they share one entry: their avatars overlap and one sentence says what they did, such as "Priya, Sam and Lee commented, edited and assigned you an action in Payments architecture", with where it lives, how many updates there were and the time of the latest underneath. Click it to see every action underneath, newest first. A sentence names at most three people, then "and 2 others".
Anything that arrived since you last looked carries a New pill, as on the Timeline. The very first time you visit, nothing is marked: a whole history marked new would tell you nothing.
What Happened has no filters, on purpose. Whether someone simply looked at a document is theirs to know, so opens never appear here.
See Timeline, at the end of the heading, opens the Timeline: everything that has happened, your own doings included, with filters and a calendar (below).
Visiting Home does not count as having caught up: what is marked New here is still new on the Timeline, and the count on the sidebar's Timeline row clears when you read the Timeline.
The Timeline
The Timeline is the full feed of everything that has happened across your documents, teams and account, including what you did yourself. It has its own row in the sidebar's Overview group, under the Inbox; you can also open it from See Timeline on Home (or at /explorer/timeline).
What lands here
Every event on the feed comes from something that actually happened in your account. Nothing is guessed, and nothing is written by hand.
- Your documents: created, duplicated, moved to a folder, taken offline or synced back to the cloud, shared into or removed from a team, and one "Document Updated" card per person per day for the edits. On a document you own, a visitor opening or copying it through a share link shows too.
- Collaboration: comments, threads resolved, actions assigned or completed, share links created, and a share link about to expire.
- Teams: invitations sent and answered, members joining, leaving or removed, role changes, and a team renamed or deleted. Teams are run on liveworkspace.app, and these cards come from there.
- Your account: API tokens made, revoked or about to expire, and images uploaded.
Renaming a document is not an event of its own: every card names a document as it is called now, so a rename updates all the older cards about it. (Renaming a team does get a card.)
If a document lives in a team's shared library, everyone in that team sees its events. A personal document's events are yours alone.
With Documents chosen at the top of the page, the Timeline leaves out other apps' items; with All Apps, it shows what happened to every liveworkspace app's items too, and clicking one opens it in its own app.
What is new since you were last here
That is the question the Timeline exists to answer, so it keeps a watermark of when you last read it.
- Anything that arrived since then is marked
New. The mark is per reader: your teammate's has its own. - The sidebar's Timeline row carries a count of what you haven't seen, so you can tell from any other Explorer section that something happened. It counts other people's events only, because a number that goes up because you moved a document is not news.
- The watermark moves forward when you read the feed, and only from the top of it, so paging back through last month never marks the month as read.
Reading a day
Events are grouped by the day they happened, newest day first, with a dot and a line running down the left. Today's group is marked with a Today pill, and each day's events are laid out as cards in a grid (one column on a phone, up to three on a wide screen), the same cards Recent uses in Card view, so you recognise a document by its picture before you read a word.
Days and times are your local ones, so an evening's work in Sydney sits under that evening rather than under yesterday.
A card leads with a preview of the document, then its name, then why it is on the timeline: "Document Created", "Document Updated", "Comment Added", with the time and, where it matters, who did it. Events with nothing to picture (a team, an API token, images uploaded) show their glyph in the preview space instead, so every card in a row is the same shape.
Click a card to go to whatever it is about: the document, the team, your invites. Cards you cannot open are dimmed, so you can tell at a glance. A deleted team is the usual case: there is nothing left to open.
A document card has the same ⋯ menu as it does in Recent. Open, Share, Rename, Duplicate, Change Folder, Favourite, History, Hide from Recent, Open Team (for a team document), Take Offline or Sync Document, Remove from Timeline, Delete: if you spot yesterday's document on the feed and want to file it, you do it from there rather than finding it again in a folder. Right-clicking the card opens the same menu. Whatever you do from a card shows on the feed straight away, with no need to refresh the page.
Other cards take you where that thing is managed. A team's card opens the team's library; an invitation to you opens your teams on liveworkspace.app, where you answer it; an API token's card opens your API tokens on liveworkspace.app, where tokens are made and revoked. Their menu holds Remove from Timeline.
Deleting a document takes it off the Timeline. While it waits in the Trash its cards are hidden, and restoring it brings them back. Once it is deleted for good, every card about it goes and nothing is written in its place: there is no "Document Deleted" card. A deleted team keeps one "Team Deleted" card, since other people may have relied on it.
Every card's menu has "Remove from Timeline", just above Delete or any other destructive verb. If today is getting cluttered, take off the cards you don't need to see again. A stack has the same menu, and removing it takes every card in the run off at once. It only tidies your feed: a teammate looking at the same event still has it, and a team's activity feed keeps everything. A removed card stays removed even if the same thing happens again later that day.
A document you created and then worked on the same day shows one card, "Document Created", rather than a Created and an Updated card with the same picture. Editing a new document on the day you made it is not news.
Colour tells you what kind of thing happened
The colour of a row is about what happened, not which part of the product it happened in:
- Red: something was destroyed or someone lost access: a document moved to the Trash, a team deleted, a member removed from a team, a token revoked.
- Amber: the shape of things changed: renames, moves, team membership, roles, sharing, and anything about to expire.
- Green: the ordinary business of building: created, edited, commented, completed.
Three colours rather than one per feature, because the question you are asking as you scan is "is any of this alarming?", and only that question has a useful colour answer.
Busy days collapse
A day where you duplicated six documents should not be six cards. When several events of the same kind land on one day, they fold into a single stacked card, such as Documents Created, reading "6 events · click to expand", with the count in its corner.
Click it to open the run in place. The stacked card stays at the front of the run, now reading "click to collapse"; click it again to fold the run back up. A stack wears a New pill if any event inside it is new.
New comments never collapse, so you can always read what was actually said.
What is coming up
Not everything on the feed is in the past. Anything with an expiry (an API token approaching its six-month limit, a share link about to lapse) appears above today, under an Upcoming pill. Upcoming cards never count as new: something scheduled is not news until it happens. Revoking the token, or revoking or extending the link, takes the warning away.
This is the reason to open the Timeline before something breaks rather than after: a script that stops working next Tuesday says so this week.
Calendar view
Switch Cards to Calendar in the header to see the same events as a month grid. Each day carries one dot per colour present, with a number when there was more than one, so a red dot tells you something was deleted that day without opening anything. Click a dot to read that day's events of that kind, as the same cards the list shows. On a phone, the Cards and Calendar switch sits at the top of the Filter popover, under View.
The arrows page one month at a time, empty or not, because the gaps are part of what you are looking at.
Filtering
The Filter button opens three things. Activity by switches the whole feed between Everyone and Other people, which is the one to reach for on a busy account where your own edits bury everyone else's. Events nobody performed, a token about to expire, survive that filter: no person did them, and they are exactly what "what did I miss" is asking about.
Below it, under Show, sits a chip per kind of event: Comments, Actions, Created, Edits, Renames, Trash, Sharing, Teams, Organisation, Favourites and Account. Only the kinds your feed holds get a chip. Turn a chip off and those events drop out of the feed; Reset turns everything back on, and a dot on the Filter button tells you a filter is on.
Last comes a small calendar for jumping to a particular day: pick a date and the Cards view scrolls to it, or the Calendar view moves to its month.
The feed shows 30 events at a time; Show More at the bottom loads the next page. Filters only look at what has loaded, so if nothing matches yet, load more before concluding there is nothing.
The Timeline is not live: nothing slides in while you are reading. It loads when you open it, and it checks again when you come back to the browser tab and shortly after you change something yourself (deleting a document from a card, say, takes its cards away straight away).
Filters and the calendar view are per visit. Come back tomorrow and the Timeline opens on Cards again.
Guests and signing in
Home and the Timeline work without an account, like the rest of livedocuments. A guest sees their own document activity and comments on their documents; team, invite, and token events need an account, so they simply do not appear.
Your history follows you. Signing up moves your history, and what you open, to your new account alongside your documents, so a week of work as a guest is still there afterwards.
A document's history
The same feed appears for one document's history, from the History item in a document's menu: everything that has happened to that document, created, commented on, shared, filed.
The Timeline keeps a year (365 days) of history. To step back your own recent edits on a document, use Undo in the editor.
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