Getting started

Home is where you land when you open Tana. It is a board of cards rather than a single list. The set of cards and their layout are fixed.

Home shows your own calendar events and organization-level events synced by other members, so a meeting a colleague scheduled on a shared calendar appears alongside your own.

Select "Space" from the create menu. New spaces are private to you by default. Add team members through the location and access settings when you are ready to share, or restrict access further on individual documents inside the space.

Opening the create menu from inside a space creates a subspace nested under that space. See Nested spaces.

Select "Doc" from the create menu, or from the "+" button on any space home or date. A Doc is the default item kind for freeform writing, and the create menu, types table, space home buttons, slash command, and AI tools all use the label Doc. The slash-menu aliases "note" and "document" still match the same option, so existing muscle memory keeps working.

When you create a typed entry inline (from the kanban board's "+" buttons or the slash command), the Inline document popover protects in-flight work: while the new doc is still in proposal state, clicking outside or pressing Escape no longer discards what you typed. Only the Create button (to keep it) and the Discard trash icon (to drop it) close the popover. Editing an existing doc is unchanged: outside-click and Escape still dismiss the popover.

The fastest way to create a type is to ask AI. In any AI chat, describe what you want to track ("a Bug type with priority, assignee, and steps to reproduce") and the AI will create it, with fields, workflow, and AI instructions. No templates to pick from, no pre-made catalogue. Every type you need, you can just ask for.

To create one manually, select "Type" from the create menu. Give it a name, add fields, and optionally enable a workflow. Types can live in a space or at the organization level.

The sidebar is the main navigation in Tana. It sits on the left side of the screen as a flat list of destinations: Search, Home, Calendar, Work, Spaces, and More. Your own pins sit below them, and the account menu at the bottom. There are no tabs.

The rows above More are places you can be, rather than a list of things the organization holds. More is the index of everything.

On wider screens the sidebar is always visible and can be resized by dragging its right edge. On narrower screens it appears as an overlay when opened. On the calendar and meeting routes it takes a dark theme to match the meeting background.

The create menu is accessible from the pencil icon in the sidebar toolbar, or from the "+" button on space home pages and on a date. It is a searchable palette with these options:

• Meeting, Doc, Canvas, Task, Chat, Agent, Type, Space, Skill
• Custom types: Any types you have defined, grouped by space

When used from a space context, created items are scoped to that space and the Space option is hidden. Opening it from inside a space and choosing Space creates a subspace nested under it.

Tasks open as inline cards rather than navigating away. Everything else navigates to the new document.

Open search from the Search entry in the sidebar, or with Cmd+PCtrl+P from anywhere, including while editing a document. It opens as a centered dialog, wide enough to show results in the table view, hosting the same browse interface: a search field for full-text search across Tana, the filter bar, and, when you have not typed a query or set a filter, the per-section index. On iPad and other touch devices it opens as a bottom sheet that stays clear of the on-screen keyboard.

What you type searches text as written. Matching a person's name tolerates accents and visually similar characters from other alphabets, so "muller" finds "Müller" and "orjan" finds "Ørjan". The same holds for @ mentions and people pickers.

Auto-filter

An Auto-filter button sits at the right of the search field. Press it, or hit enter, and Tana interprets the sentence into the filter pills below, so "meetings with Jane last week" becomes the Meetings kind plus an attendee and a time filter. Press it again to drop the interpretation and go back to the literal search.

If the sentence cannot be turned into filters, the button offers Try again and your text matches stay on screen. Editing any filter yourself also clears the interpretation and runs the search from the pills alone.

Related documents

Under the direct text matches, a Related group lists documents that are about the same thing without matching the words you typed. When nothing matches literally, that group is all you get, and its heading says so.

Arranging results

• Group arranges results by Type, Status, Assignee, or one of a type's own member fields. Each group collapses, and a truncated group carries Show all.
• Sort orders them by Title (A to Z or Z to A), Created, Updated, or Start time. The table's column headers sort the same way.
• Display picks the Displayed attributes: which of a type's fields each result row shows as a column.

Filters

Search and the Library share one filter bar of round pills. An active pill turns solid and carries an ✕ to clear it.

• Meetings, Tasks, Docs, and Chats: one-click buttons for the everyday kinds
• Type: a picker for anything else, including the types you have defined
• Created by: a people picker, with you pinned to the top as "(you)" and an Anyone option to clear it. It takes more than one person
• Visibility: narrow by who can see an item, Any, Private to you, Shared with you, Restricted, Open, or Anyone with the link for items shared by link

Picking a kind reveals its own sub-filters. Meetings adds When (Recent, Upcoming, Today, or Past) and Attendees, a multi-select people picker that narrows to meetings including everyone you pick. Tasks adds Status, which takes several states at once and reads them back ("Open, Proposed", with Any status to clear it), and Assigned to (Anyone, You, Unassigned, or a specific member).

When the filters narrow to a single type, that type's own fields join the bar as pills you can edit in place, including its Options fields, which offer a checklist of the field's values.

Without a query, the filters act as a browse mode. Narrow to Meetings only and the view becomes a dedicated meetings table (title, the space it lives in, time, attendees, and a lock for private ones), sorted with the most recent first.

Keyboard navigation

Arrow keys move through the dialog as a grid: up and down step through results, left and right cross between the filter pills and the controls on a row. Focus moves in and out of the search field without leaving the keyboard.

Saved searches

A search worth keeping can be saved as its own Search document from the filter row, in search, the Library, and a space's home. Reopen it to run it again, always against what is in Tana now, and pin it like any other document to keep it a click away.

A saved search stores how you had the results arranged alongside the query, so it comes back grouped and sorted the way you left it. Editing an item from the result list, changing its status or assignee, updates the row in place rather than leaving a stale one behind.

The AI can save a search too, and can point you at one that already exists rather than composing a new query. See Search results in chat.

More expands in place rather than opening a page. Under it sit the organization's contents by kind, plus a Library row that opens the full index.

The Library page shows an ordered preview of each category, Spaces · Meetings · Tasks · Types · Chats · Agents · People · Skills · Canvases · Docs, each with a See all link to its own page. Empty categories hide themselves.

A category page shows the category title, a Library breadcrumb to step back out, and an inline search field; section routes (Spaces, Chats, Agents, Skills, Canvases, Docs) also carry the shared Created by and Visibility filter pills, and Chats adds an MCP pill that narrows to chats started from an MCP client. The Types page adds a single-select space filter. The Skills section lists only the skills your organization has authored; Tana's built-in system skills are filtered out.

The Meetings preview defaults to a Recent window, with a dropdown to switch it to Upcoming, Today, or Past. It hides itself when no meetings fall in Recent, but once you narrow to an empty window the header stays so you can switch back.

Media, meaning images, audio, video, and uploaded files, does not appear in the Library, in space browse, or in Search; it still renders inside the chats and documents that embed it. Anything that does not live in a space or on a meeting lives in the Library, and its location pill reads Library. A space home uses the same section index, scoped to that space.

Work is the board for what you owe people: ongoing chats, your tasks, your agents, MCP chats, and your Notifications. The sidebar row carries a badge with your unread notification count, because the Notifications card lives here.

The Notifications card shows its most recent entries, with a View N more button for the rest. Notifications cover when someone:

• Assigns you a task. Assigning a task to yourself does not notify you, including when the AI does it while acting on your behalf. Ask the AI to assign a task to someone else and that person gets a notification attributed to you
• Starts a call you are waiting on
• Sends you a chat message
• Archives or restores a type in your organization. The row carries the type's current title, correct across renames, and links to its panel

Each row shows an unread dot before the title, the actor's avatar, and a relative timestamp. Click a row to go to its source, or use Mark all read in the card header.

Urgent notifications, an incoming call being the one that matters, fire outside the app and take you straight to the meeting when clicked: a system notification on the desktop app, and a browser notification on the web. Browser notifications have to be enabled first. The Notifications row in Settings, Preferences shows whether they are on and offers an Enable notifications button, or points you to your browser settings if you have blocked them.