Navigating the App
Every workspace in Conspecta is reachable from the left sidebar, wherever you are in the app. Pick a project and a workspace there, and the working area beside it shows what you open. This page covers the parts you use no matter which workspace you're in.
The Sidebar
From top to bottom:
- The Conspecta wordmark, which takes you home
- The project picker, showing the project you're in
- The workspaces, in four titled groups
- Search and Inbox, pinned above the bottom
- Your account menu at the very bottom
The workspaces are grouped the way a project tends to run:
| Group | Workspaces |
|---|---|
| Plans & Documents | Planner, Notebook |
| Research | Samples, Imaging, Cytometry, Genetics |
| Results & Reports | Data Tables, Figures |
| Operations | Facility, Inventory (with Items, Orders, and Suppliers beneath it) |
Facility and Suppliers belong to the team, not to a single project, so they stay available even when no project is selected. Everything else needs a project and stays locked until you pick one.
Your account menu holds View Profile, Settings, Feedback, Get the mobile app, Conspecta Guide, Trash, and Sign out.
Don't use some of these? Hide any workspace under Settings → General. Hidden workspaces leave the sidebar and the phone home screen but stay reachable from search, links, and keyboard shortcuts, and you can bring them back anytime.
Tip: Switch the sidebar to compact mode in Settings → General to get the icon rail back and hand the width to your data. Hovering a workspace still shows its name, and hovering Inventory opens its sub-items.
Switching Projects
The project picker shows the project you're in. Click it, or press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P, to open it. Inside you'll find:
- A search box, so a long list is one or two keystrokes away
- Your projects, grouped under the team that owns them
- Any pending team invitations, with Accept and Decline on the spot
- New project under each team, and New team pinned at the bottom
Switching is instant, and a workspace you've already visited keeps its state: your filters, your scroll position, and whatever you had part-typed are all still there when you come back.
If your role on a project is view only, a View only chip sits next to the project name so you always know why an action isn't offered.
The Project Page
Selecting a project without picking a workspace lands you on the project page, which is the best place to start a working session.
Where you left off is a strip of the dozen things you touched most recently, of any type, with thumbnails. Filter it by type, or clear it when you're switching to something new. Clearing is local to your browser and to that project, later work refills it, and there's an undo if you didn't mean it. A brand new project shows a map of how the workspaces connect instead.
Recent activity is the project's feed, with a type filter, collapsing runs of related edits so one busy afternoon doesn't bury a week.
Project Members lists who is on the project and what they can do, and is where the project lead is handed over.
Opening an item from here threads a back link, so its back button returns you to the project page rather than dropping you in that item's workspace.
Search
Press Cmd/Ctrl + K from anywhere. Search reaches across every project you have access to, and you can narrow it without leaving the dialog box.
Type tabs run along the top: All, Notes, Protocols, Tasks, Samples, Inventory, Facility, Figures, and People, with Image Analysis, Image Collections, Cytometry, FCS Datasets, Gating Templates, Data Tables, Genetics, and Suppliers under More. The FCS Datasets tab finds both datasets and the individual files inside them.
Filters sit on the right: a time range, Starred, and, depending on the tab, a status or a category. Team and project pickers live in the search bar itself, so you can widen to every team or narrow to one project without switching projects first.
With the box empty, search shows what you and your collaborators changed most recently, so it doubles as a way back to yesterday's work. Set a time range and the list becomes everything that changed inside it, newest first. Your own recently opened trail steps aside, since when you last opened something says nothing about when it changed.
Search is also a command palette. Type to jump to Settings, Inbox, the Conspecta Guide, or any workspace. And you can select several results and export the selection as PDF, Excel, or CSV in one go.
Tip: Search by whatever you remember, such as a partial name, a sample ID, or a date. You don't need to know which workspace the thing lives in, or even which project.
How Workspaces Are Arranged
Most workspaces share the same shell: a toolbar with search, sort, filter, and a view toggle, a landing page of items, and a detail view when you open one.
Grid and list are the two views nearly everywhere. Grid is for scanning pictures, list is for scanning names and dates. A few workspaces have a third view built for their data, such as the Board and Calendar in Planner, the box map in Facility, the sequence viewer in Genetics, and the editor in Figures.
Folders group items by experiment, paper, or topic. The trail above the list shows where you are and lets you click back out. Drag items onto a folder to file them, or drag a folder onto another to nest it. On a touch screen, hold a card or row until its checkbox fills in, then keep your finger down and move to carry the selection into a folder.
Starred items get their own band at the top of the landing page, above folders, so in-progress work doesn't need digging for.
Expiring soon appears in Samples, Inventory, and Facility. It's a cross-folder view of everything past its date or close to it, searched on the server, so it finds items that aren't on the page you've scrolled to.
Trash
Deleting almost anything sends it to Trash, in your account menu, where it stays for 30 days and can be restored. Everything sits in one list with the newest deletion at the top, deleted projects included. Empty Trash clears it early, and asks first. For what a permanent delete removes and what it keeps, see Delete and restore.