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Getting Started

Welcome to Atlas — a writing and research app for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS built around projects, documents, and the connections between them. Whether you're drafting a novel, organizing research, or building a reference library, Atlas gives you a flexible workspace that adapts to how you work.

This guide walks you through the essentials: creating your first project, navigating the workspace, writing and formatting your content, organizing documents, and exporting your finished work. If you're brand new, start with The Basics below and work your way through. If you're looking for something specific, each section links directly to the relevant topic.

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A Tour of Atlas, The Sample Project

A Tour of Atlas

The Tour of Atlas Project Icon

Atlas comes with a bundled sample project called A Tour of Atlas, a small, complete project you can open to see how documents, folders, canvases, and media fit together. It's the fastest way to get a feel for Atlas and see what it can do before building a project of your own.

Tip

When you have no projects yet, the Welcome to Atlas screen offers an Explore the Sample Project button. Choosing it installs the sample as a real, editable project that behaves like any other — poke around, change things, add documents, or delete it entirely when you're done. The sample project is a great sandbox. Because it's a normal project, nothing you do in it is permanent to Atlas — rename it, reorganize it, or remove and restore it whenever you like.

Tour before buying

The subscription screen offers a Tour a sample project button — a hands-on demo you can try without a subscription. Unlike Explore, the Tour is temporary. It opens the sample in a dedicated tour mode that resets each time the tour begins. While you're in the tour, a card sits at the bottom of the Organizer:

Enjoy the Tour! — Play around in the sample project and learn how Atlas works. Tap here to go back.

Tap that card to leave the tour and return to where you started.

Info

While the Tour launched from the subsciption resets, the Sample Project created from the Project screen or left from a previous tour will remain available and not reset.

The Basics

Get oriented with the core concepts and interface. These pages cover how Atlas is structured and where to find things as you move between projects, documents, and views.

  • Projects

    Create and manage your workspaces — title, author, cover image, and project settings.

  • The Workspace

    The three-column layout: Organizer, Editor, and Inspector, and how they adapt across Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

  • The Organizer

    Your navigation hub — browse, rearrange, and manage everything in your project.

  • Documents

    The six content types: text documents, folders, canvases, sketches, media, and web pages.

  • The Inspector

    Document metadata, writing statistics, heading outline, and connections like incoming links and references.

Writing

Atlas uses a live-rendering markdown editor where your formatting appears as you type. These pages cover the editor itself, the formatting you can use, and how to attach images, links, and notes to your writing.

Organizing

Projects grow quickly, and Atlas gives you several ways to structure your content. Folders provide traditional hierarchy and canvases let you arrange things spatially.

  • Using Folders

    Hierarchical structure, the Folder Outline View, and organizational patterns.

  • The Canvas

    Spatial workspaces for arranging document cards, pins, labels, and media visually.

Collecting

Bring external content into your projects — files from your device, content shared from other apps, and web pages clipped from Safari.

  • Importing Media and Web Pages

    Bring in images, PDFs, audio, video, and web pages from files, photos, or other apps.

  • Share Extension

    Send text, links, images, and video from any app directly into Atlas on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

  • Web Clipper

    Save web pages from Safari with full content extraction, editing, and template-based capture.

Publishing

When your work is ready to leave Atlas, you have plenty of options. Export to a wide range of formats with live previews and per-folder settings that remember how you like things.

  • Exporting Your Work

    Export to Markdown, Plain Text, HTML, ePub, RTF, or PDF — with live preview and folder export options.

Next Steps

Once you're comfortable with the basics, explore the in-depth guides for specific workflows: