Write Notes and Protocols

The Notebook holds two kinds of page. A note is the narrative: what you did, what you saw, what it means. A protocol is the recipe: numbered steps with materials, timers, and instruments, written once and then run at the bench as many times as you like. Both live in the same workspace, under their own tabs.

Notes and Protocols

The workspace opens on two tabs, Notes and Protocols, and the header offers Import, New folder, New note, and New protocol. Whichever tab you're on gets its create button first.

Folders hold both kinds, so a folder built around an experiment keeps its protocol next to its results. Each tab lists its own kind, and a folder only appears on a tab when something inside it belongs there, so a folder of meeting notes stays off the Protocols tab. A new folder with nothing in it yet stays on the tab where you created it.

If you start something as the wrong kind, Convert to protocol or Convert to note is in the page's menu. Nothing is lost in the conversion, including its comments and sign-offs.

Sort by date, name, or status, and filter by when it was modified, who owns it, or its status. The box in the toolbar filters the list you're looking at by title, and Cmd/Ctrl + K searches across the whole project.

Note Status

A note carries a status through its life: Draft, Work in Progress, Needs Review, In Review, Approved, and Archived. It sits above the title and is separate from the review process, so you can mark something Needs Review before you've decided who should look at it.

Importing

Import, or a drag onto the workspace, takes Markdown, PDF, and Word documents. Bring in several at once, and Conspecta asks whether the batch should land as notes or protocols.

The Editor

Type into the page and it saves as you go. There's no save button.

Press / at the start of an empty line for a quick menu you can filter by typing. The + button in the toolbar opens the full Insert view instead, which describes what every block does and is the one you get on your phone. Both cover the same options:

The blocks you use most float to a Suggested row at the top of both menus, so the third western blot page is faster to write than the first. When a label alone doesn't tell you enough, the quick menu's Browse all 34 blocks row switches to the full view.

Text formatting covers bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, subscript, and superscript, four heading levels, alignment, indenting with Tab, and both text and highlight colors. Find and replace is in the toolbar.

Words can carry a link. Select text and press Cmd/Ctrl + K, or use the link button in the toolbar, to set the address, or just paste a URL over the selection and it links in place. Pasting a URL with nothing selected leaves the address where you dropped it and offers Embed a URL? next to it, where Enter or Yes turns it into a website card and Esc or Keep as text leaves the address as plain text. While editing, clicking a link shows a small menu to Open, Edit, or Remove it; in read-only views a click opens it directly. A URL typed on its own becomes clickable without any of this. A link can also live as a website card instead of inline text, and the link dialog's Turn into embed makes that swap. Everything you can do to a card sits behind the ⋯ button on it: Copy link, Edit title, Edit URL, and Turn into text link to put it back in the paragraph.

Every block has its own menu for adding a block above or below, duplicating it, deleting it, and Move to… or Copy to…, which sends it into another note or into a Planner task, creating the destination on the spot if it doesn't exist yet.

Progress Bar is worth knowing about: it counts the checkboxes on the page and shows how far through them you are, which turns a checklist into something you can see the end of.

A Timer block holds a duration you set while writing, and anyone reading the page can start it. It runs on the same clock as the timers in Bench Tools: it carries on counting while you work anywhere else in Conspecta, shows in the strip at the bottom of the screen, and chimes when it's up, naming itself so you know which one ended on a page holding several.

An inserted Table has a Table style panel behind the cog in its top corner. Choose how the table rules itself: Grid, Lines for horizontal rules only, Outline for a frame with nothing inside it, or None. Then turn on a header row, a header column, or banded rows, pick Compact or Comfortable spacing, and add a row or column next to the cell you last clicked. On a tablet, tapping a cell brings up the row and column handles, so inserting, deleting, and reordering all work by touch. A linked data table is different: it stays connected to the table in Data Tables, and you choose which range of rows to show rather than editing them here.

Drag images onto the page to add them, several at once if you like, and each lands as its own block in the order you dropped them. Upload image in the Insert menu adds one from your files, and you can paste an image straight from the clipboard.

PNG, JPEG, and BMP go in as they are. A TIFF is converted to a PNG of its first page, since no browser displays TIFF, so a multi-page or 16-bit scan arrives flattened. Keep the original in an image collection when that detail matters.

Images get their own toolbar for alignment, full-screen view, cropping, markup, and downloading. Click an image to open it full screen and the same toolbar comes with it, so you can crop, mark up, or download straight from there. Full screen is where you go to look closely at a blot or a field of cells: scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to move around, and the first three buttons on the toolbar zoom in, zoom out, or fit the whole image back on screen.

Cropping is non-destructive. The whole image stays in the page and the crop decides which part of it shows, so you can reopen Edit crop to change your mind, or use the reset button there to go back to the whole image. Once an image is cropped, opening it full screen or marking it up shows you the cropped version, and Download offers you either that or the original file.

Side by side places two columns next to each other: a gel photo beside its interpretation, a reagent table beside the steps that use it. Each column holds text, lists, checklists, images, or tables, and pressing Enter inside a column keeps writing in that column. A vertical line marks the boundary so you can see where the second column starts; hover the section for Hide divider if you'd rather not see it, or Remove split to stack the columns back into ordinary blocks. Exports keep the layout, divider included: PDF and Word render real columns, and Markdown stacks them in reading order with a label on each. On a phone the columns stack too.

Writing a Protocol

A protocol page opens with a version pill and a summary of its total time, step count, and materials. Press Edit to change it and Done editing when you're finished, which is what keeps the recipe stable while someone else is running it.

The blocks you build a protocol from are different from a note's:

• Step, the numbered unit of work
• Safety note, at Info, Caution, Warning, or Danger
• Expected result, for what the bench should look like if it worked
• Day break, which marks that everything after it happens the next day

Each step can carry more than its text. Capture defines the fields to fill in when the step runs, such as an OD reading or a lot number, so the run collects the same data every time. Links attaches a Material from Inventory, an Instrument from Facility, or an Image analysis to launch. And Add branching splits a step into named cases, so "if the pellet is loose, do this instead" is part of the protocol rather than a note in the margin.

Alt/Option with the arrow keys moves a step up or down without dragging.

When the recipe is ready, Start run takes it to the bench. That's covered in Run a protocol.

Templates

Anything you write can become a template. Save as template asks where it belongs: Private to me, or Shared with team so everyone reuses the same structure. Neither choice is tied to a project. A private template is yours in every project you work in, and a shared one reaches every project the team owns, so both outlive the project you saved them from.

Pictures on the page come with it. The template keeps its own copy of each one, so a page started from it shows them in any project, and still shows them after the original page is deleted. A template holds up to 50 pictures, and they count toward storage the same way any other file does.

The form stays up until the template is saved, so you always know whether it worked. If the name is already used in the store you picked, it says so and asks whether to replace that template or rename this one; replacing a shared one replaces it for everyone. The same name in the other store is fine — those are two separate libraries. If two templates already share the name, you're asked to rename rather than replace, since there'd be no way to tell which one would go.

Conspecta ships with a set of starters, including protocol recipes for western blot transfer, PCR amplification, bacterial transformation, cell passaging, plasmid miniprep, and Gram staining. The picker groups your favorites and recently used templates at the top.

You can keep 200 of your own templates and 500 in a team's shared library, counting notes, protocols, and data tables together. At the limit, saving another asks you to delete one first.

Reviews and Sign-offs

The Activity panel is where a page gets discussed and signed off. The composer has four modes:

• Comment to say something
• Request review to ask specific people to look, which notifies them
• Approve to sign off, optionally with a note
• Request changes to say what has to happen before you'd approve

Approvals can be conditional, with a reason such as "needs verification" or "minor revision needed", which is often more honest than a flat yes or no. You can withdraw your own decision later if you change your mind.

On a note, a comment can be attached to a specific block rather than the whole page, so feedback lands where the problem is. Protocols are commented at page level.

Version History

Save version in the page menu takes a snapshot. Choose whether it's a major, minor, or patch change, add release notes if the change deserves an explanation, and Conspecta labels it. The first version you save is always v1.0.0.

Version history then shows the timeline, with the number of blocks added and removed in each version and your current draft on top. From there you can View version, Compare with draft, or Compare with previous to see exactly what moved. Restoring a version puts it back as the working draft.

Sharing and Working Together

Every page is either shared with the project or private to you, toggled from the page menu with Share with Project and Make Private. Only the page's creator sees that toggle, so a teammate can't hide your page or share your draft.

The difference is bigger than visibility. A shared page is live: two people can type in it at once, you see each other's cursors, and edits merge without anyone overwriting anyone. A private page is yours alone, saved as you type, and never opens a collaborative session. Private pages are still stored on the server and are included in your exports. They're simply invisible to everyone else.

Making a private page shared starts its collaborative life fresh, so share a page before several people start working in it rather than partway through.

@ mentions a teammate in a comment or in the page itself, which sends them an inbox notification with the surrounding text.

Exporting

The page menu's Export produces Markdown, a Word document, or a PDF. Select several pages on the landing page and Download exports the batch in one go. Page info in the same menu gives you word, character, and block counts along with who has contributed.