How to Use ClickUp Docs (Beginner Tutorial)

Are ClickUp documents any good? ClickUp came out with Docs 3.0 a while back. Does that make ClickUp docs better than Notion? Better than Word? Better than Google Docs? Maybe. To find out, we're going to go through a quick rundown of what the heck ClickUp docs are, what they're good at, what they're not so good at, and I'll leave the ultimate decision as to whether it's the best tool for you to the end. Ready to get started? I think so. Let's start off with ClickUp's basic facts of what the heck documents are. What you're seeing right here is what a document is. This document is something we've put inside our hierarchy of ClickUp that we can move around just like any other list. And inside this document we can have a bunch of information. We can have emojis, we can have text that's formatted in different heading styles. We can have banners that highlight different thoughts and resources. We can have bullets. We can even have things into columns if we want to. These are what documents ultimately do. They allow you to format information in a document. Similar to other tools, we also have the ability to add sub pages here. So if we wanted to add a page inside a page, we could do that right here with the nested subpage feature. And in case you're wondering, you can nest quite a bit of pages inside each each other here. And I have not yet reached the limit, but I'm sure there is one eventually. But despite the fact that you are able to create pages inside your ClickUp documents, the pages themselves don't really need to exist because your documents themselves are infinitely long. You can add information into these documents and just keep adding it and adding it and adding it and adding it and adding it. As you see, I actually am adding a bunch of stuff here, and you'll just be able to keep adding all of your information into one seemingly endless, seemingly infinite page of information here. So if you didn't want to have to create a bunch of different pages, that's optional for you. Documents can do it all. In addition to documents being able to format text, as I already showed you, ClickUp documents also have compatibility and connection to other ClickUp things, which is part of that whole app to replace them all philosophy. If I type slash on my keyboard while I'm inside a document, I'm going to see the slash command area come up. And this is where a lot of our formatting options are appear in case we want to do things faster without having to use our mouse, but we also see some features that we wouldn't otherwise know exist. For example, the ability to add a list view from elsewhere inside our ClickUp account and have it show up inside this document. That's a pretty cool feature and can be a huge time saver if you wanted to have your ClickUp tasks talk to the information in your documents. If I were to scroll way down on this file, in addition to all the formatting, like the stamp sticky table of contents, which I think is quite fun, it shows you the format of your document even as you scroll down, there's also an embed area where we can choose information outside of ClickUp and have it show up inside our document, such as a YouTube video that we want to add. There we go. We can view it directly from this document and even resize it to fit whatever style we're looking to have inside this file. There are a ton of options built into the slash command menu that so I definitely encourage you to check it out. It even allows you to take things like Google Docs and have them fully editable and embedded inside this doc page. Really cool. In addition to the actual content of the document, though, there are a few other features I want to make sure I draw your attention to. In the top corner of every document, there is the title of the page and then there is an icon. And this allows you to choose either an emoji or an avatar, which you can color to whatever color you'd like and and gives an icon for the information that you're gathering. So this can be a really nice way to set a vibe to make it clear what this document is about and add a bit of decoration. Up above that, we have a cover option. So by default you might see something like this, but when you click Add a Cover, you can choose a whole bunch of kind of stock gradients. You can link to images elsewhere, you can upload your own images, or you can even look in upsplash to see what content they have there. And you can give your own style to this document based on whatever look you're going for. So you've got those aesthetic benefits as well. Up at the top, while we're looking there, I should highlight that. Commenting is also built into every document. So we could highlight a certain area of text and add a comment saying I love this and post it in there so that way people can review our edits together. Next to commenting, we have relationships where we could connect this document to tasks by mentioning things and creating backlinks. Whole other Video on that up here if you want to learn about relationships. Next up, we have Settings. Now, Settings is the same thing as what appears if you just click over on the right sidebar. But Settings is all of the bonus effects that we have to help us format and organize our document. And I promise we're going to come back to this. But let me keep going over some of the basics. First, below the title of your actual document, you have the author or the creator and the last time the page was updated. If you click on that update date, you'll be able to see every single change that was made to that document and even revert back to those changes if you prefer to see things in a previous form. So you never have to save anything on a ClickUp Doc. Just like a Google Doc, everything is saved in pretty much real time. Below the update date we have the sub pages. So this is just showing us any pages that are inside here at the next level. So if I create another page and I go back up, you'll see that there are now two untitled pages under here. That's what this top section is showing us. In addition to just using the left sidebar like I just did, we can also add new sub pages right here and even change how they appear using the subpage size settings that appear right when you hover over the sub page. I don't know, divider line, I guess. Now, the last feature I want to highlight on this main page before we go on and talk about settings is you see this little gear that appears on certain blocks that we have dragging around here? Like I drag around this block, there's no little gear, but this one has one. Well, if you click on those gears specific to certain blocks, you are going to see some bonus information show up. In this case, it's aligning our text inside the columns that we have and the option to duplicate. That's just a little bonus tip that I wanted to share. Now, once we've got past how cool the actual document function is, let's look over at the right side for some bonus options here. First choice is that we have options around font style, size and the actual width of the page. So whether it's staying boxed or if it's going to maximize that space. In this case, let's go with serif. Below that we have options around the header. So I already showed you the default options here, but we could add additional things like a subtitle, contributors, or even hide other sections that we do not need. I've already demonstrated to you what the Sticky table of contents looks like this guy here that follows you as you go through different headings inside your document. But we can turn that off here should we choose. We can hide the entire subpage section that I showed you earlier. And we can also choose to protect this document from editing if we wanted to. Below that we see some statistics about our document, including the word count characters and the amount of reading time, which I think is a nice little detail, as well as the option to show that information while we're typing. You know, if you're a student trying to reach a certain word count for an essay, that could be a great way to do it. Below this is an option for Focus mode. This basically says when you click into an area to work, everything else kind of fades away. In my experience currently using ClickUp, this tends to cause some glitches, especially when you're using collaborative editing. So I would not recommend turning this on unless you really, really need to. Tends to just bog things down at this stage. To the right of this we have the Advanced menu, which is fun for people who are looking to focus in on the font size piece of the equation. This gives you a little bit more granularity versus just small, medium, large line height. The distance between our lines can be adjusted here. Paragraph spacing, page width, you know, nuanced again and again. Those same options we already saw before, but we are just changing that top section to show us more or less detail. Next to this we have templates. So if there are certain documents we've created in the past, we can pull this in or we can even use some of the basic templates that ClickUp has created for us to save us a little time and and use these templates to get us started on our blank pages. To the right, we have that commenting feature we already talked about next to Comments. We have the ability to export this page into various forms. And ultimately we have the Doc settings, which are kind of what. These are also called page details. Doc settings, I don't know, but these are a few other, like big picture options around this actual document as an entire entity. So if you have any options that you're looking for that were not in the actual visual settings, they're probably going to be found here, including saving as a template or relocating a document. At the very bottom of the section, you do see the option to make a Doc view public. This is an important one for those of you who want to share this document with others. As of right now, all ClickUp documents by default are in ClickUp. So if you are trying to talk with people who are not inside ClickUp, you can either invite those people into ClickUp, which uses up a guest seat, or you can share your document publicly and provide view only access to anyone who has the link that you share with them. Obviously, this means anyone with the link can see your document, so proceed with caution. But if you're trying to let somebody who's not in ClickUp see what you're working on, that's a great path forward. The public sharing option is frequently used by people who use ClickUp documents as their proposal tool to create a proposal for a client, or as a project plan or update. Like you see here, where they want to share it with their entire client's team, but but they don't necessarily want that whole client team inside of ClickUp. But that in a nutshell is what documents are. All those features tucked into this expansive hierarchy of document pages that you can have that are all into one searchable document. When you have this document here, it's visible wherever you currently have it located inside your hierarchy. And if your team has the document repository on, it also shows up here in this section called Docs. This section is a Qlik app, meaning it can be turned on or off depending on your team settings. So if you don't see that area, just head into your settings as an admin user and check for Docs home being on. That's what's going to determine whether or not the centralized area shows up. While you're in there, you might be interested to check out this one. This basically just allows multiple people to edit a document at the same time. If you haven't gathered, I would definitely recommend you keep that on because that can be a huge time saver. So we've talked about ClickUp Docs. Why the heck would you use them? Well, ClickUp Docs are really helpful whenever you want to expand on an idea in a document format. If you use just tasks to represent your ideas, your writing area is really limited to this description, which, while you can make it full screen, while you can do all the same things for the most part you can do in a document view inside a task description, it's not as pretty as a document. I mean this isn't made for massive amounts of text like a document view is. So anytime you're looking to expand in written form to get your ideas together, a document might be nice to use. Common use cases include things like project plans, agendas, or even like a note taking system like you see here. With this note taking Template provided by ClickUp. Granted, you can also use these two features side by side by connecting documents and tasks together by mentioning, say, your project plan inside your task description. And this is how that kind of relationship and backlink system starts to come together. You have your document for your long form information and your task to tell you when to do things. Now, before we wrap up, I do want to share two pro tips about documents for anyone who's just getting started with them. Number one is that documents don't have folders. So while you can put documents inside your spaces hierarchy here by themselves in the actual documents general area, there's no folder system here. So if you have your documents just all thrown in here, it can quickly look like a mess because there's everything everywhere and you're not sure what things mean because the default name is typically doc. So to resolve that, you have some options that I want to make sure you take advantage of. The first option is to put your documents in your hierarchy. So here we where it says add to location, I could put this in my sidebar my navigation and choose a spot inside my existing hierarchy to put that particular document. So in this case I'm going to put that there. And there it is. Another option I have is to use the tags option where I can create a tag called agendas and apply that to all of my agendas so I can easily see them all in one place. So let's just pretend this is an agenda and so on and I could then filter by my tags to see just certain types of documents. Tags are the substitute available for folders, and I know it's a bit of an adjustment, but it is one way to organize your files in their own system. The second pro tip I want to share about documents is that permissions with documents are set at the document level. So this whole document here actually not in that window. Excuse me for clicking on the wrong spot. It's the little share icon. We need to go in here and change what people that document is shared with so we can make it public to our whole workspace private and we could share it with individual people one by one if we wanted to. That is found under this guy, which is different than what it is in tasks. Don't ask me why it's inconsistent. But this is where you're going to set your permissions. If we had a bunch of stuff in here, like let's say we had this page called secret page, we cannot just go to one page and change those permissions to be private just on that page because this is always going to be all pages being affected by our sharing and permissions. So if you have a secret page it is better off to move that to its own secret document because anyone who sees this document will see everything in it just the way the cookie crumbles. So we have talked about what docs are, why people use them and some pro tips along the way. I want to turn it back to you with the ultimate question of should you use ClickUp docs? And actually that's a pretty good segue because even though ClickUp docs are great, they're not for everyone and there's certain reasons why they might not be the right fit for you either. So if you're looking for a part 2, watch this video here and figure out why I actually stopped using ClickUp docs. Yeah, sorry for that little turn there at the end. All right, thank you so much for watching and until next time enjoy the process. Sam.