How to Use ClickUp Docs (A Step-by-Step Tutorial)
Maggie from ZenPilot walks through ClickUp Docs from the ground up: how to create and format documents, link them to tasks, use AI features, build templates, and share or export your work.
Hey everyone, it's Maggie, your friendly neighborhood client coach from zenpilot. And today we're talking all things ClickUp docs. What they are, where they are, when to use them, why to use them, who should be using them. We're going to go over all of that and more in today's video. Let's jump in. Here I am inside of ClickUp 2.0's doc hub. This is a list of docs that are throughout your entire workspace. They show you where they're located and whether there's any tags on those docs. Tags on docs operate the same way that tags on tasks do inside of ClickUp. They're searchable, but they don't really allow you to do much past search them. It also shows you when things have been updated, which is really helpful from a governance standpoint. And we'll log into one of these docs so you can see exactly what more governance looks like inside of docs. You can see when you last used it, and whether it's being shared publicly or with anybody via this column here. And as with anything inside of ClickUp, these three dots are your gateway to lots of other activities that you can do on that particular thing. So when you click the three dots on a dock in the doc list view, you can rename it, duplicate it, those typical activities that you can do inside of ClickUp when you click the three docs. So let's jump into an actual doc. This particular doc has been enabled with AI. There's another video that you can watch that walks you through all of the different AI features that are available inside of ClickUp. But for this purpose, we're going to focus on docs here. You can name this anything you want. This is a title. This is what will show up in that list view. This is also what will show up when you link a doc inside of ClickUp anywhere else. Meaning if you are in a task and you link this doc, it will give you a ClickUp link to this doc that says you can name this anything you want. And that will give you a really clear idea of the title of the doc. Here you can see I created the doc. I'm logged in as ZenPilot. I updated it today. If you want to, you can go ahead and start writing. This is just a doc, much like a Word doc or Google Doc. You can do text generation here. You can start writing. You can bring in bullet points. Nice. You can bring in numbered lists. Nice. But if you are interested in more formatting options within a doc, just Hit the backsplash back slash on your keyboard and this will bring up a feature menu of different types of formatting options, whether or not you want to bring in a checklist or you can use a banner. Banners are one of my faves. I love to add in like, this is important. And then you can add an emoji to let people know that this is important. And so there's lots of different options here inside of docs when it's come to formatting. I also really enjoy the fact that you can bring in a button and that button can point anywhere, including a website that teaches you how to spell the word point. And from here you can link it anywhere, color it, anything. You can align the text within that button. And so this is a really cool way. Let's just go to Google real quick so you can see what it looks like. You can align this button within the doc, left, center, right, all those fun things. A couple of other really fun features within Docs is of course writing about AI. So, or writing with AI, I should say. So you can type anything in here. Provide me a list of three summer activities to do with dogs. And from here it will generate that text prompt that you asked it to and you can edit the inputs. And so you can change here with dogs and cats, let's see what that could potentially bring up. And it will generate a new list of a new prompt, a new output. You can insert this into your doc, and so you can see here what it looks like to pump that AI generated text straight into your doc. Very nifty. Like I said, there's another video that you can watch from the productivity professor that goes through more of these AI tools. I'm going to delete all of this real quick, so let's start fresh. Oh, but wait, there's more. What if I want to go back and see what I wrote? Okay, that's fair. So from here we can bring out this sidebar. This right sidebar is hidden unless you unfurl it. And from here I can also go and look at the history of this doc. So if I wanted to know what I thought I should be doing with my dog, I can restore this version and it will give me the ability to go and pull out all of the previous edit history within the dock itself. Very nice. We also have in the right sidebar lots of different options. If you are creating docs that you intend to share with your clients, I highly recommend giving it a cover image and then actually uploading a branded version of this cover cover image. Whether it has their logo in it or your logo in it. When you go to download or share this doc with your clients, you want it to look professional. And so this cover image is a really good way to get there. You can also give this page title an icon you see. When I toggle it off, it disappears. If I toggle it back on, I have the ability to see that title. I don't know why you would ever want to hide your title, but the options there if you want it. You also have the ability to add a subtitle and we talked a little bit earlier in this video about governance. If I want to see who logged into ClickUp and has contributed to this doc, I I can turn on contributor so I can see if there's any other people that have come in here and edited the document, added to the document, whatever it may be, and all of those changes and edits will be captured in that history like we looked at just a moment ago. Additionally, you can give it a sticky table of contents. In order for you to have a table of contents within your doc, you do have to use headings. That's what it's pulling that table of contents from. That's super easy. You can either add a heading by using that backslash command again and bringing up those formatting options. You can also type some words and then like most text editing tools, you can change the formatting of that particular thing after you've already typed it. So lots of very familiar text editing features within ClickUp docs. So let's talk about the things that are unique to ClickUp docs. So when we are looking at this sidebar, we have the ability to protect a page or protect the entire doc. And so what this is showing me is that you need a Business plus or more plan within ClickUp in order to protect pages. But if you want to protect a page that's essentially the same thing as locking it down, you and nobody else would be able to edit this doc unless they unprotect the page. And in order for them to unprotect the page, they have to manually go in and override that protect page setting. And you can block people from being able to do that with certain permissions that are only available with a Business plus or more plan. This can be helpful if you have individual contributors outside of the organization that you don't necessarily want editing docs that you perhaps maybe want to lock things down after you have finalized the doc and sent it to the client. This gives you the ability to make sure nothing Changes after you want it to change. Let's take a look at another feature inside of ClickUp Docs that is super nifty. This is the relationships and references. And so this gives you the ability to link this doc and create a relationship to anywhere else inside of ClickUp on a task. This is helpful because if you don't have a relationship between the doc and the task, the dock is kind of homeless, like it doesn't belong anywhere. You'll always be able to find that doc inside of that doc hub that we started in, but otherwise it doesn't actually live anywhere where the work is getting done. So what you're able to do is, is create a relationship to another task, a doc, or a link. So let's find a link. I want to create a link between this doc and a task. I see that there are zero links presently inside this doc and I need to create one super simple I click this plus sign and I click task. And this brings up the task search bar. And let's say this is a Google search campaign doc. And so now I can see here in the relationships and references field that I am linked to this particular task. I can also see over here in the menu bar of the doc that there is a relationship. And if I click that, it will show me exactly which relationship there is to this doc. If I click into the task, I will also see that there is a relationship to to the doc. So it creates this cyclical linking relationship throughout ClickUp that allows you to quickly reference those materials that make getting your job easier. So much like anything inside of ClickUp, a doc can be a template. This is super helpful when you are trying to standardize the way you do work throughout your entire organization. You can convert any doc into a template that can be deployed inside of any space in ClickUp. So much like a task template or a list template or even a view template, you can create all sorts of settings and formatting options and view permissions. You can build all of that stuff into the doc itself and then you can save it as a template. And it's very simple. You click this wand, the magic wand button, and you can either update a preexisting template or save it as a template. And so this is my test template exclamation point. And I want this to be available to anybody and everybody. But I also want to give this a tag so that I can search for it later if I need to. And so I'm going to give this the Tag template and 2023 and reb perfect oh, I lost. I lost my template. Found it. From here I can click Save and it's going to give me a nice, shiny, beautiful template. And so if I want to, in any space inside of ClickUp, go in and associate or reference that template so that I can create a new doc for a project that I'm working on, I can go to View and I'm going to bring up a doc view, because that's what a doc is. It's a view. Bananas. I know it's the only. I feel like it's like one of the only view types that is less about getting work done and more about how the work gets done. A whiteboard could also be argued to fit in that how work gets done category. But for example purposes, let's stick with our doc. I'm going to go to add doc and at this point it's going to bring in a blank doc. So, so from here I want to bring in a template and so I'm going to go for, let's go find my new template. This is my test template. I know that's the one I want and so I'm going to select this and it's going to give me a template. Amazing. This works really well for like marketing briefs and content briefs and meeting note documentation and things you want to share with your client and have a set standard way you want those things to go and look. All of this makes a great use for templates. It gives you the ability to make sure everything looks the way that you want it to look without anybody ever having to ask you the question, how do you want this to look? A template does the talking for you. Let's take a hot second and talk about creating tasks inside of docs. Although the productivity professor has a much longer video on this, I want to show you quickly how easy this is to get done and why you should do it. So when we were creating a relationship earlier in this video to a task, we were creating a relationship to a pre existing task. You can also create a task inside of a doc and that relationship will automatically be generated for you. That's pretty nifty. So let's say this is about a food lion retainer and food lion. We're having a meeting with them and, and they come to us and say, we want you to make the lion roar in our branding. Be like, oh, okay, let's, let's roar that lion and I can create a task that says make the lion roar. Great. So from here all I need to do is highlight that particular line of text and select task. I can see here that it's already pulled putting this new task that I'm creating in the appropriate folder in the list where the doc already lives. However, if I wanted to, I could relocate the task where where this task is ultimately going to live by just selecting a different location in this dropdown. So let's put this in account management and I'm going to assign this to myself. And this needs a due date of this weekend and it's needs some custom fields filled out like actionable and branding. And all of these custom fields, depending on the location where you select for this task to live, will be available for you to fill out. And from here I can click Create. Once I click Create, I can see make the lion roar has become a task. And this has become a task in the doc itself, which is incredible because now there's a relationship between the task and this doc created for me without me having to do anything. So I can see here that this particular task exists. Cool. Let's change the status. Let's say that I've already moved this forward and it's pending review. The next time I come and reference this particular document, I can see the status of that particular task, which is great, because if I need to tell the client, last week we talked about making that lion roar. Wanted you to know it's pending review at this point. Presto. Amazing. Now, you might be wondering, okay, what do I do with the doc now? You can export it. Super simple. You click this little button down here that says exports and imports, and you can export this document as a PDF, you can extract the HTML and the markdown, or you can even print it. And you'll notice here that it's giving me the option to export this page or all pages. If I had multiple pages in this one doc, this all pages would be super handy. But in this case, I just have this one page. So from here I can select PDF and it will generate a file that will automatically download for me. And so when I click this dude, I can open this dude and I can see see all of the information. This says private because I have not shared this list where that particular task lives. And so if you ever want to share these docs with your clients or outside of your organization, I strongly recommend that you test this export a couple of times before you settle on a way that you want to export things to ensure that this looks the way that you want it to look before you're sending it outside of the organization. You can also share this doc by giving it a public link. You'll notice that I went to sharing and permissions and from here I can click Share this link with anyone and at this point it will generate a public link for me. Then you change out the change. Hair change. I totally forgot to tell you that in The Future Docs 3.0 will be a whole new thing. What you saw today in this video was Docs 2.0. The cool and exciting thing about Docs 3.0 is that everything that you learned today is still applicable in 3.0. There's just some really cool features that consumers and customers have been asking for, and ClickUp has been like, you know what? Bet that's a good idea. So look forward to Doc 3.0. It's going to not change the world, but it could change the way that you communicate internally and with your clients. Anytime you're looking for new tips on how to implement ClickUp within your agency, click the subscribe button here on Zen Pilot and we'll see you next time.
