Your first document

Documents in Dalea look like a notebook page but they are made of structured blocks. A paragraph is a block. A 96-well plate map is a block. A registration table that writes rows straight into a data table is a block. This means everything you write is automatically searchable, referenceable from other places, and, when you publish a template, reusable.

Create the document

1. Open Documents
   Sidebar → Documents

   Click Documents in the sidebar. You land on the workspace's project list, which is where documents live.

2. Open a project, then click New Document

   Use New Project first if the workspace is empty. Inside the project, New Document creates the page. Give it a title: something operational like Plasma collection, IFN-γ kinetics, mouse #M-12 is more useful than Notes.

3. Or create it from anywhere

   Press ⌘. (Ctrl . on Linux/Windows) to open the Create panel and pick Document. The location picker lists every project plus Workspace Files, which leaves the document outside any project.

4. Type a heading and a paragraph

   The editor is plain — type Markdown-style or just write. # at the start of a line becomes a heading.

5. Add a block

   Type / to open the slash menu. Entries are grouped Text, Data, Compute, Lab and Media. Insert a Section from Text to get a collapsible heading, then a 96-Well Plate from Lab.

The plate designer is a block like any other: it lives inside the document, and the layout you draw is part of the document's structure rather than an image pasted into it.

Embed something other than text

The slash menu carries fifteen custom block types on top of the standard text ones. Some you'll reach for first:

Multiplayer is on by default

Anyone in the workspace with edit permission can open the document at the same time. You'll see their cursor and selection in real time. There is no "save" button: every keystroke syncs live to the other people in the document.

Versions are a separate, deliberate layer. Dalea captures one automatically when the last person disconnects from the document, and you can take a named one at any time with Create Version Snapshot in the History panel.

To open that panel, click History in the document header. You can preview and diff any version from there. Restoring is append-only, so nothing is lost, but only the document owner can perform a restore.

What's next