Share and Export

Your data is yours, and getting it out is not a favor Conspecta does you. Exports are free and never count toward compute usage. This page covers the whole-project backup, the per-workspace exports, and how sharing actually works.

Exporting a Project

Settings → Export is the main route. Pick a project, pick what you want, and press the button, which names the format it's about to produce.

Most of these are limited to the project's owner, including All of the above. Notebook and Flow Cytometry exports are open to any project member.

All of the above is also the only way to get the dye signatures your lab has measured, as one workbook covering every instrument, dye, and lot. Nothing else can recreate those numbers, because each one comes from a stained control tube read on that machine.

What Only the Full Export Carries

Five files come with All of the above and nowhere else. Each one records something that sits alongside your records rather than inside any one workspace, which no single workspace export can show on its own.

sign-offs.xlsx is every review decision in the project, oldest first: what was signed off, who signed it, when, what they said, and the version of the content they were looking at. That last column is headed Content Version At Signing, and it holds whatever the app recorded as the content's identity at the moment of signing. For a notebook page that is a hash of the page. For a sample, a sequence, a figure, a table, or an analysis it is the time that record was last edited. Conspecta stores it as it was and the export hands it over as it was, so you can tell whether a record has moved since somebody put their name to it.

resource-links.xlsx is the provenance trail. Each row names one end, what it did, and the other end, so a protocol run reads as Consumed the specimen it used and Produced the result it made. The sheet says whether a link was stated by a person or detected from the content, and flags any link that has since gone stale.

starred.xlsx is your own starred items, with what each one is and when you starred it. Other members' stars are theirs.

templates.xlsx is your saved templates — the forms you fill in rather than the pages you wrote from them. Each row gives the template's name, whether it is personal or your team's, what it creates (a note, a protocol, or a data table), its description, the title it pre-fills, its tags, and how many times it has been used. A templates/ folder holds one JSON file per template with the body itself, so a template can be read back as the form it is.

image-collections.xlsx is the index to your microscopy. One sheet lists each collection with the record it is attached to and how many series and images it holds; a second gives each series its dimensions, bit depth, and how many channels, z slices and timepoints it covers; a third gives every image its channel, z position, timepoint and the path it sits at inside the image archive; a fourth does the same for pictures pinned to a sample, a note or an analysis, with their scale in microns and any condition, replicate and timepoint labels. The pixels themselves come from Image Collections, and that download now carries the same workbook, so either archive can be read on its own.

An image belongs to the record it is attached to, so you get the images on records you can see. A picture pinned to a colleague's private sample keeps a row, because its file is in the archive either way, and that row gives its size and type so the archive still accounts for every file. Its name, the record's name, and the path it sits at are all theirs, since the path spells out which record it belongs to.

You get your own templates plus your team's, which is the same pair the template picker offers you. A colleague's personal templates are theirs. Team templates travel when you are a member of the team that owns the project, so a collaborator invited to a single project gets their own shelf and the lab keeps its own.

Work a colleague kept private stays theirs. A notebook page, a data table, a flow analysis, an image analysis, or a figure belongs to the member who made it until they share it, so the Notebook, Data Tables, Flow Analysis, Image Analysis, and Figures exports carry only your own plus the ones shared with the project. All of the above works the same way, which is what the app shows you anyway.

A sample set follows the same rule, so the cohorts you get are your own plus the ones shared with the project, each listing the members you can see. The three files above follow it too. A sign-off on a colleague's private record stays out, and a provenance link travels only when you can see both ends.

Folders work the same way. A folder somebody keeps private leaves the records inside it at the top level of your export, so the record still reaches you and the folder name stays theirs.

A gating template is the lab's rather than any one person's: every member can read, apply, and edit one, so Gating Templates exports every template in the project. What a template was used on is personal work, though, so the Used By sheet lists your own plus the shared ones, the same set the used-by count shows you in the app.

The Flow Cytometry ZIP follows the same rule for its folders, but not for the files inside them, because an FCS file belongs to the project rather than to any one member. Nothing is dropped from your download. What changes is the filing: the ZIP builds a folder for each analysis you can see, and a file used only by someone else's private analysis lands in a folder called Unfiled instead.

If you own more than one project, Export All Projects queues the lot in one go.

While It Runs

A big export runs on the server, and the dialog box tracks it. Full-project, image, and flow cytometry exports are limited to one per project per day, since they're expensive to produce and rarely needed twice.

If it takes long enough that you'd rather get on with something else, you can close the page. Conspecta emails you a link when it's ready, and that link downloads the file directly.

Exporting From a Workspace

Most workspaces have their own export for the thing you're looking at, which is usually what you want rather than a whole-project archive:

• Notebook: a page as Markdown, Word, or PDF, or several pages at once
• Planner: a task as PDF, Word, or Markdown
• Samples: QIIME2 metadata, in a project with microbiome samples, and a plate as Excel
• Orders: a filtered CSV with a column chooser
• Facility: instrument usage as a billing summary or a session-by-session list, and your own bookings as an .ics calendar file
• Genetics: sequences as FASTA, and a sequence map as an editable SVG or an annotated picture
• Cytometry: a gated population as a real FCS file, statistics as a spreadsheet, and plots or the whole gating tree as PNG or SVG
• Data Tables: Excel, which keeps formulas and formatting, or CSV, which is values only
• Figures: the figure as PNG or an editable SVG, or a single chart as PNG, SVG, or TIFF — both at a printed width in millimetres and up to 600 DPI

Search has one too. Select several results in Cmd/Ctrl + K and export the selection as PDF, Excel, or CSV.

Sharing

Sharing in Conspecta is membership, not links. There are no public URLs and no anonymous access, which means nothing you keep here can leak because someone forwarded an address.

Three layers decide who sees what:

1. Team membership decides who can be on a project at all
2. Project membership and role decide what someone can do inside it, from full control down to view only
3. Each item's own visibility decides whether your teammates see it yet: private while you're still working it out, shared when it belongs to the project

That third layer is per item, so you can keep one analysis private while the rest of your samples are shared, and flip it whenever you like. All of it is covered in Manage your team.

Sharing Outside Your Team

To bring in a collaborator from another lab, add them to your team and then to the project they should see, giving them View only if they're reviewing rather than contributing. A view-only member can read, search, and export everything shared with them, and can sign off on an item when you ask them to review it, but can't change anything.

For a one-off, export the specific thing and send the file. A figure, a protocol PDF, or a data table is often a better answer than an account.