The five-minute tour

A whirlwind through the surfaces you'll touch every day. None of these are mandatory — the app works fine if you only use the sidebar — but they each save real time.

The sidebar

The left rail. From top to bottom:

• Workspace switcher: your current workspace, click to change. Workspaces are grouped by organisation in the dropdown, and the same dropdown ends with Manage Workspaces.
• Create: the global entry point for everything creatable, also on ⌘..
• Search: a button, not a nav item; it opens the command palette, same as ⌘K.
• Workspace nav, in three groups. Workspace: Home, Documents, Templates. Operations: Data, Inventory, Calendar, Provenance. Extend: Addons, Community. Everything except Addons is workspace-scoped.
• Recent documents: quick links to what you opened last.
• Support: Learn (the in-product tutorial hub), Report a Bug, and Upgrade on the Free and Pro 5 plans.

The bottom strip carries notifications, the collapse control and your user menu. On mobile the whole rail becomes a hamburger menu.

The command palette

Hit ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl K (Linux/Windows) anywhere in the app. The command palette is bimodal:

• Plain keywords become a search across documents, data records, templates and files in the current workspace.
• Action-oriented queries ("create a new document", "show all templates") are detected as AI requests and open the AI assistant instead.

Enter follows whichever mode is live: it opens the highlighted result if you have one selected, otherwise it sends the query to the chat when the palette read it as a request, and falls back to the full search page. When a query matches nothing at all and was not read as a request, the empty state offers an Ask AI instead button that hands the query to the chat. Tab and ⇧Tab move the selection, the same as the arrow keys.

The AI chat panel

Opened from the floating Dalea logo button, which you can drag to any corner of the screen. The assistant has the context of your current workspace and document. Ask it things like:

• "Summarise the latest run of the IFN-γ ELISA assay and flag any outliers."
• "Find all mice in study DLA-7 with a baseline weight under 22 g."
• "Open the protocol for plasma collection."

Most writes pop a confirmation card before the assistant proceeds. A short allowlist runs without one: schema edits (which only touch the reversible staging snapshot, while the commit itself is confirmed), data exports, import-mapping edits, and workspace shell commands. You can also pre-approve specific action types so they stop asking.

Notifications

The bell at the bottom of the sidebar, or in the tab rail on mobile. You'll see organisation invitations, mentions (when someone @-tags you in a document or comment), and platform notices. A badge on the bell carries the unread count, capped at 9+, and unread rows in the list carry a dot.

The chat with a document

Two separate moves. To see a document and the chat at once, put the chat in side-panel mode with the dock toggle in its tab bar. To point the assistant at something, drag the document (or any entity chip) onto the chat: it attaches as context for your next question rather than opening.

What's next

You've now seen the four most-used surfaces — sidebar, palette, chat, and the notification bell. Time to build something real: