The editor

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The editor is where you write the draft of a document. It has no toolbar across the top: formatting comes from typing, from a slash palette, and from a small bar that appears when you select text. Everything you type goes into the working draft, never straight to the version readers see.

A pending review changes nothing here: you keep typing, and the reviewer decides on the copy taken at submit — nothing typed afterwards can reach it. See Submit and approve.

Opening a document

A document opens ready to write. Its content and the editor arrive together, so you can read it, scroll it, follow its references and start typing from the first moment — there is no connecting step and no read-only pause to wait through.

What arrives is the draft as it stands now. Alchex reads the current content at the moment you open the document — coming back to a document you had open a few minutes ago never shows the older copy you last saw and then swaps it for the present one; the text on screen is the text your first keystroke lands in.

A document that opens read-only is telling you something real about the document rather than about the network: the file is archived, or your role on its team is Reader. A pending review does not make a document read-only. See When you cannot type.

Renaming it

The document's name is the last step of the path at the top of the page, and it is an input: click it and type. There is no separate title field and no rename dialog — the name is edited exactly where it is read.

The name is shown in full. It used to lose its last characters as it grew — a Change Management Procedure drew as Change Management Procedur — because the bar measured the name in one weight and drew it in another. It now measures what it draws. On a bar the assistant panel has squeezed, a long name can still run out of room; hover it and the whole name appears.

Names are capped at 120 characters, which is about what the bar can show at a normal window width — the limit and the promise are the same fact. Renaming needs Writer or higher, and it is safe during a review: the version under review keeps the name it was submitted with, and your rename applies from the next one.

The writing surface

Open Governance → a document and the editor fills the middle of the workspace. The document's text appears immediately and is yours to type into from that first moment — see Opening a document. Select some text and a formatting bar appears over it — it formats, and nothing else: talking about the document happens in its Comments panel, opened from the top bar, not in the text (see Comments). Hover any line and a handle appears in the margin beside it — beside that line, including each item of a list on its own. Drag it to move the line; a marker shows where it will land. Click it instead for that line's actions: move up or down, duplicate, insert a paragraph above or below, delete, and Turn into for changing it to a paragraph, a heading, a quote or a callout. Turning a list item into anything else lifts it out of the list — into a paragraph it simply loses its bullet, into a heading, quote or callout it becomes that, and the list closes up around it. Blocks that are a single unit — a table, a quote, a callout, a side-by-side layout — get one handle and move whole. The same actions are on the right-click menu. The handle belongs to the document alone, and it stays inside it: open a settings window or any other panel over the editor and moving the pointer across it summons nothing, and the handle itself never leaves the part of the page the document occupies. Hover a long line whose top has scrolled out of view and the handle waits at the top edge of the text, beside the part of that line you can see, rather than following the line off-screen onto the bar above.

The assistant is not on this bar. Until September 2026 a small sparkle button sat at the right of the document's own bar and opened the conversation about that document; it is gone, along with the register's matching button, the panel that used to dock beside the draft and the floating ✦ that hovered in the corner of every page. Ask Alchex now lives in one place: the sidebar's Chat entry. Pin the document you want to talk about with the ⌖ picker in the composer there. See AI review and assistance.

To the right of the writing surface is the document's Properties panel — the same word on every kind of record since 2026-08-15; it read Details here, Register properties on a register and Record properties on a risk, which is three names for one panel. It opens on the same five facts every record kind opens on — Code, Owner, Created, Type, Status, in that order, in the same rows, so the panel you learn here is the panel you can read on a register or a risk. A fact the record does not hold reads as a dash rather than vanishing. Under the five come the parts only a document has: a Document control section, its files, and — when the document cites evidence — Backed by, the list of what it rests on.

Document control is the block the printed template carries in its header: whether this document is in force and at which version, who approved it and when it took effect, and when it is next due for review. In the app these facts live in the record itself — the Status row says whether the document is in force and at which version, and the full approval story is the Activity trail — and every Word export carries them as generated Document control tables. The details panel draws no separate Document control section. Every line is read from the record itself, so it cannot be typed, edited, or left half-filled — before the first publish it says plainly that the document is a draft nobody has approved yet, and a fact the record does not hold shows as a dash rather than a blank to fill in. It is the record of a decision, not a way to make one — deciding happens on My Approvals, and opening a review is a server verb, not a button (see Submit and approve). It distinguishes Approved by from Published by: the first means someone other than the author reviewed it, the second that the owner issued it themselves, and the panel never reports one as the other. (A document whose content is an uploaded file has no writing surface at all: its Properties panel starts closed so the page gets the full width, and carries Version and Replace file instead. It renames the same way this page describes — from its name in the path — so the gesture is the same whichever kind of document you opened. See External documents.) That list is derived from the document itself: every register or connected-source reference you write in the text appears there, and it appears only once there is something to show — a document that cites nothing simply has no Backed by section. See References.

References you write are live in the text as well as in that list. The way to write one is the / palette's Mention entry, which opens the reference picker — and pasting a record's own URL into the text lands the same chip, while copying a chip out of the document gives your colleague a link they can open. Every chip leads with an aliveness dot — green while its target is verified alive, amber when its source cannot be reached, red once it is gone — so you can see from inside your own sentence whether what it names is still standing. The details panel also lists the document's imported files — rename, download or remove them right there. See References and Registers.

On a control, that rail is the audit rail instead, and it reads the draft as you type: attach an evidence reference and it stops saying the control has nothing to audit, without waiting for a publish. Not every reference counts as evidence, and the rail says which do — a document, an imported file or a connector; a register or control reference is a link, not something the audit can read records through. It also tells you when the draft has moved ahead of the published definition the audit would actually judge — and stops saying so once you publish, with no page refresh. See Controls and evidence.

Every empty space you can see is a place you can write. Click below the last block and the caret goes to the end of the document; click the blank strip under a table, between two tables, or after an image, a page break or a divider, and a thin blinking bar appears in that gap — start typing and a new paragraph is made there. Click the margin between two paragraphs and the caret goes to the nearer of the two. This is the rule everywhere in a document, so a table at the very bottom no longer traps you inside its last cell, and a document that ends in a picture is not a document you have run out of room in. Beside an inline chip — a reference, an @mention, a workflow action — the same rule applies to the small gap on either side of it: clicking there puts the caret next to the chip rather than selecting it, so you can keep the sentence going.

The usual shortcuts work while you type:

Markdown as you type

Structure is created by typing, at the start of a line. The characters disappear and the block changes as soon as you press space.

These only fire at the start of a block. Mid-sentence they stay as plain characters.

The document font

How a document reads is not the document's decision at all: every document follows your organization's document style, set once in Settings → Documents so the whole workspace reads as one set. There is no font control on the document — no chip, no per-document exception — which is exactly the point: nobody opening a policy has a typography decision to make, and no document can drift away from the rest.

When the organization style changes in Settings, every document follows — body text and each heading level alike. The style sheet names them separately (Body, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, each with its own font and point size), so your organization can give headings their own face and exact sizes while every document still renders identically. Code is the one deliberate exception — it stays in its own monospace face so it still reads as code.

The slash palette

Type / anywhere in the body and a menu opens. Keep typing to filter — items match on synonyms as well as their names, so "kanban" finds Collection and "upload" finds Mention. Press Enter to insert, Escape to close.

A few worth knowing:

• Table drops a plain 3×3 grid. Collection is different: a table of rows you can track and group, with grouping toggled from its header.
• Table of contents is live — it rebuilds itself from your headings as you write.
• Mention is the one door to pointing at anything — documents, registers & logs, controls, risks, files, connected data. It opens the reference picker, whose own rail does the narrowing (importing a file and connecting a live resource happen inside it), and what you pick lands as inline chips in your sentence. See References.
• Page break only shows up when the document is printed or exported. See Export.
• Workflow action chips also live in sentences, but they are not placed from this palette — the workflow builder proposes them from your prose. Clicking a chip opens its settings; nothing runs until the document publishes. See Workflows in documents.

The document fills the page — the text column centers itself in the available width on one continuous white surface that runs to the bottom edge, and the space below the last block is part of the writing surface. Nothing sits above your text: the document's name lives in the top bar as the last step of the path ("Governance / your document"), and clicking it there edits it in place. The document's type, code and dates live in the details panel, one press away in the top bar. There is no inner frame to run out of; the page is the frame, and a document longer than the window scrolls inside it — the surrounding navigation stays put.

The panel buttons

At the right of the document's top bar — the band that already carries the path, the save word and who else is here — sits a small group of icon buttons, one per work panel, set off by a thin rule from the ⋯ menu beside them. Press one and its panel opens beside the text without leaving the page.

The panels themselves have not moved. Each still docks as a 340-pixel panel on the document's right edge, still one at a time — open another and it takes the space — each with its own header and a ✕. What moved, in August 2026, is the buttons: they used to sit in a 44-pixel column of icons down that same right edge, and that column is gone, so the document gets its width back. Nothing about what the panels hold changed either.

It is the same arrangement a register and a risk record have, in the same place, opening the same panel — one component, not three that resemble each other. Until August 2026 the document's own was drawn by the document software itself and the others by the app, which is why a document's panel was slightly narrower and shaded the other way round. They simply stopped being a different shape on every kind of record. The same is true of the line above the document: the path, the save word, who else is here and the ⋯ menu now sit in the same band a register's name sits in.

The panels:

• Comments — the document's whole conversation, in time order: one list, one box, @ mentions notify. The same panel every record in Alchex carries.
• Assistant proposals — work the assistant wrote for a part you had already changed, held back rather than merged over your words, with Apply and Dismiss on each. Its button is a pen over a page, and it is not always there: it appears when something is actually waiting, with a small dot beside it. (It wore a sparkle until August 2026, when the assistant's own button in this bar took that symbol; that button has since gone too, and the pen stayed — it says what the panel holds.) See AI review and assistance.
• Version history — published versions, saved versions, and each editing session your typing was recorded as; tick any two versions to compare them, or choose Return to this on a session to wind the draft back to how it stood then. On an archived document the panel is read-only: browsing and compare stay, saving and restoring wait until the document is restored. See Version history.
• Activity — the document's audit log, docked right beside Version history: the two answer sibling questions (what the document said, what happened to it), so their buttons sit together. The feed itself is described in Activity and archive; its CSV export is one of the choices in the document's Download window.

Approval is not one of these buttons. Since the one-home cut no record carries an Approval panel: the document's Status row and Activity trail report what stands, and the deciding happens on My Approvals, where View changes on the row opens the full comparison. The document itself offers no approval act at all — no publish button either: approving a review is what publishes, and the server's publish verb serves tooling and automation. See Publishing.

The outline

The outline is not one of those panels — it lives in the page. Down the left edge of the document sits a small stack of bars, one per heading, wider for a chapter and narrower for a subsection: a miniature of the document's shape, visible at a glance without opening anything. Rest on it (or click it) and it opens into the heading list itself — the current section marked, every entry a jump that scrolls the heading into view with a brief highlight. It appears once the document has headings and stays out of the way until then, and on a narrow window it steps aside entirely.

This is navigation for reading the document; to put a table of contents in the document — one that travels with it into export, print and the published version — type / and choose Table of contents. Both lists are the same live outline and jump the same way.

The document's details — owner, type, code, created — open from the same group of buttons as one quiet card, so everything about the document is behind one row of icons, not in a second sidebar. Every panel here carries its own name and a ✕, so you close the one you are reading from inside it rather than hunting back to the icon that opened it — the same header a register's and a risk record's panels have. The same card carries the document's citations: Backed by (what proves it) over Cites (what it points at), each row jumping to its chip in the text — see References. (There is no separate References panel; the details card is where the citation picture lives.) Its state is not repeated there: the chip in the top bar already says it, once. Once a document publishes (or while a review is pending on it) the type reads as plain text with the reason on hover, instead of a dropdown that can only refuse. On a control's page the type reads Control permanently: the document is the control's definition.

How saving works

There is no Save button for the body. Each change you make is sent to the server as you write, and everyone else editing that document is working on the same draft and receives it. See Collaboration.

The word in the top bar — Saved, Saving… or Save failed — reports the document's details: title, type, font. The body has its own path and is not what that word is tracking, with one deliberate exception: if the body stops being recorded, the word reads Save failed too. It has to. Otherwise the top bar would sit there saying Saved directly above the This draft stopped saving. notice below it, and of the two sentences the reassuring one would be the wrong one.

Saving the body does not publish anything. Once a version has been approved, readers keep seeing it until the draft is approved and published, and the details card's Status row says which version is in force: In force · v7. Before that first approval the document is in force at v1 and your readers are reading what you are writing. See Publishing.

Not losing work

Two things interrupt writing, and each says so on screen:

The unsent edits behind that first ribbon live in the open page, not in your browser's storage. Closing or reloading the tab while it is showing loses them. That ribbon disappearing is the signal that everything has reached the server.

When you cannot type

The editor goes read-only, and the chrome recedes, whenever the draft is not yours to change:

A pending review is not one of these: an edit — yours or one the AI proposes and you approve — applies normally while an approver is deciding. It does not change what is under review, which is a fixed copy taken at submission; it rides the next version. This holds however the AI edit arrives — as a reviewable diff, or folded into an Owner's one-approval publish of a new version (see Publishing). See AI review and Permissions.

The document actions menu

The ⋯ menu beside the title carries the actions that act on the document rather than its text — copy link, Download (one window holding the document's Word copy or original file, its activity log as CSV, and the option to take both zipped), and archive. No approval act lives here: publishing is what approving a review does, on My Approvals.

Version history and activity are not among them, because they are not actions: each is a panel, and their buttons already sit in the top bar a few centimetres away. The one place they still appear in this menu is a document that carries no panel buttons — an uploaded file, or an archived document — where the menu opens each in a dialog instead.

What you see there depends on the document, not just on your role:

• Archive appears for Writers and Owners, and it is the only removal in this menu — the way to take a document out of use without losing anything. On a document that is already archived it simply drops out, and so does the rule above it: Restore is not in this menu, because an archived document opens with a banner saying so, and the way back is the button on that banner. See Activity and archive.
• There is no Delete. There used to be one, sitting under Archive for an Owner and only while no version had been approved — two removals, two rungs, two answers to "can I remove this?", and only one of them reversible. Archive is now the whole of it, at the Writer rung, for a document with an approved version as much as one without.

Edits the assistant makes are annotated

An edit you approve does not just appear in the text. For each section the assistant changed it leaves a comment from Alchex in the document's Comments panel saying which section it changed, why, and that it came out of your conversation — so a colleague opening the draft later can see the reason without reading the chat. It is an ordinary comment: answer it, disagree with it. Your own typing is never annotated this way. See Comments.

<!-- Reviewed 2026-08-26 (workflow manager P4 — the Workflow panel): the document workspace gained a docked Workflow panel (Steps lanes + Runs), its door derived from the draft's chips or existing receipts (documented in authoring/workflows.md). Everything this page documents behaves exactly as before. -->