---
title: Documents
description: Create, format, and co-edit rich-text documents with WIZE — drafts, appeals, proposals, briefs.
order: 2
---

# Documents

Documents in WIZE are rich-text files you and WIZE can edit together. Use them for appeals, grant proposals, donor briefs, stewardship plans, board updates — anything you'd otherwise write in Word or Google Docs.

## Creating a document

Three ways to start:

- Click **New +** in the document tab bar.
- Click **New +** in the document search tab.
- **Drag a file onto the WIZE window** to upload it. Word docs, PDFs, plain text, and similar files are converted to WIZE's document format.

## The toolbar

Everything the editor does lives in the toolbar at the top of the document (plus a **zoom control** in the status bar at the bottom, for stepping the page larger or smaller):

- **Text styling** — bold, italic, underline, strikethrough; font family, size, color, highlight color
- **Headings** — H1–H6
- **Lists** — bulleted, numbered, and checklists (in-doc to-do checkboxes)
- **Blocks** — tables (with row/column controls), blockquotes, code blocks, horizontal rules
- **Links and images**
- **Undo and redo**
- **Share** — open the sharing panel: who at your organization can see the document, who it's shared with individually, and its public link
- **Comments** — toggle the comments sidebar (see Comments and mentions below)
- **Export** — download the document as **PDF**, **DOCX** (Word), or **Markdown**, useful for sending drafts to people without a WIZE account or for printing
- **Tags** — edit the document's tags (see [Files & Folders](/help/files-folders/))
- **File Settings** (the gear) — rename the document, edit tags, mark it as a Guide, and open the same **Sharing** panel

## Editing with WIZE

Ask WIZE in chat to edit your document — "tighten this paragraph", "add a section on impact", "change the ask amount to $500". **WIZE writes the change into the document immediately.** There is no approval step and nothing to confirm: by the time WIZE tells you what it did, the edit is already in the document.

Two things show you what changed:

- **In the chat** — an **edit card** headed "WIZE edited *your document*", with a diff of what was added, removed, or replaced.
- **In the open document** — each changed block flashes briefly, then keeps a thin colored bar in the left margin until your next message: green where text was added or edited, red where something was removed.

**To undo an edit,** click **Revert** on the edit card in chat, or just ask WIZE in chat ("undo that", "put the old wording back"). Revert undoes that one edit — it is not a way to take the whole document back to an earlier version.

If the same text has changed since — by you, a teammate, or a later WIZE edit — WIZE can't undo the earlier edit cleanly without wiping out that newer wording. It will say so and leave the document as it is, rather than overwrite the newer change. You can ask it to undo the newer edit first and then the earlier one.

There is no queue of pending edits waiting on your approval: an unwanted change is undone after the fact rather than declined up front.

## Realtime collaboration

Multiple people in your Organization can edit a document at the same time. Changes from teammates appear live.

## Version history

WIZE **does not have version history** or a document diff. There is no way to browse previous versions of a document, roll a document back to an older copy, or see exactly what a teammate changed between saves. (A version-history panel was removed in June 2026 because it never actually captured versions.)

If you need to track what changed, use **Comments** to note edits as you make them, or **Export** a copy (PDF/DOCX/Markdown) before a round of edits so you have a snapshot to compare against.

What WIZE *does* record is what happened to the file itself — who created, **deleted**, renamed, duplicated, re-tagged or re-shared it, and when. That lives in the **Activity** log in the left sidebar, and you can ask WIZE about it in chat ("who deleted my grant application?"). See [Team & Account](/help/team-account/).

## Comments and mentions

Add **comments** to ask a teammate something without changing the text. Use **@mentions** inside a comment to notify a specific user — they'll get a notification linking back to your comment.

## Sharing

Everything about who can see a document lives in one panel: **Share…**. Open it from the three-dot ⋮ menu on a document in the file search tab, the **Share** button in the document toolbar, or **File Settings → Sharing** (the gear in the toolbar, or **Settings** in the file's ⋮ menu). It has three parts, and the last two are independent of each other.

**Share with specific people.** Choosing individual people only applies once the document is set to **Only people with access (Private)** (see Privacy below) — while it's visible to everyone at your organization, everyone can already open it, so there's nothing to pick, and the panel says so. Once it's restricted, **People with access** lists your teammates with a checkbox each: tick anyone who should still be able to open it. They can then open the document even though it's hidden from the rest of the organization — this is how you share a draft with two colleagues. In **File Settings → Sharing** the change saves with **Save people**; opened as a dialog from the ⋮ menu or the **Share** button, it saves with **Done**.

**Who at your organization can see it.** See [Privacy](#privacy) below.

**Public link.** To share with someone who has no WIZE account — a board member, a colleague at another organization — choose **Anyone with the link can view** (or **Anyone with the link can edit**, documents only). **Copy link** then gives you the URL to send, and **Off — no link** revokes it. Spreadsheets, designs, PDFs and images can be link-shared read-only; dashboards can't be link-shared at all.

The public link is separate from the privacy setting: publishing a link does **not** make a document visible to everyone at your organization, and restricting a document does **not** switch its link off.

## Privacy

By default, every document is **visible to everyone in your Organization** — anyone on your team can open it, and WIZE can read it in chat. When something is sensitive (personal notes, confidential donor details, an unfinished draft you're not ready to share), you can restrict it.

**To make a document private:** open **Share…** (the ⋮ menu on the document in the file search tab, the **Share** button in the toolbar, or **File Settings → Sharing**), and under **Who at \<your organization\> can see this** choose **Only people with access (Private)**. The document is then visible only to you and anyone you added under *People with access* — no other teammate can open, search, or see it, and WIZE won't read it for anyone else. That state is what "private" means in WIZE.

**You do not have to have created a document to restrict it,** and it makes no difference whether you wrote it or WIZE did — a document WIZE created for you is yours. Anyone at your organization can restrict a document that's visible to the whole team, and whoever does becomes its **owner**.

**To share it with the team again:** choose **Everyone at \<your organization\>** from the same menu. Only the owner can widen access again — add more people, or hand the document back to the whole team — so if a colleague restricted it, ask them.

**How to tell at a glance:** a restricted document shows a small **lock** next to its name, or a **people** icon once you've shared it with specific people. If it also has a live public link, the **globe** takes priority — the document is still hidden from your teammates; the globe is telling you it's reachable from the internet.

Restricting works the same way for **documents, spreadsheets, designs and dashboards**.

## Designs

Besides written documents, WIZE can produce **designs** — visual, print-ready collateral like one-pagers, rack cards, flyers, event posters, and infographics. Ask in chat ("make a one-pager for our spring gala") and the design opens in its own tab. Designs aren't edited in the rich-text editor; iterate by telling WIZE what to change — "make the headline bigger," "use our brand colors," "swap the date." When it's ready, download it as a **PDF** for print or email.

## How chat sees documents

WIZE always sees the document tab you're looking at, plus what else you have open — so you can reference any of them in chat. WIZE can also create new documents from scratch on request.

## Guides (and the Tone & Style document)

A **Guide** is a document you mark so WIZE reads it before writing anything. Guides hold curated knowledge about your organization — your voice, your mission, your brand rules — and WIZE consults them on every draft, so you don't have to re-explain yourself each time.

The two most important Guides:

- **Tone & Style** — teaches WIZE how you sound: formality, sentence shape, word choices, what to avoid. This is the Guide that decides whether a draft reads like *you*.
- **About Us** — teaches WIZE your mission, programs, and the language your organization uses for them.

WIZE creates a starter Tone & Style and About Us for your Organization automatically, built from a general template. They're a useful baseline, but they don't yet know your actual writing — see [Getting WIZE to write in your voice](#getting-wize-to-write-in-your-voice) below for how to make them yours.

Any document can be a Guide. Three ways to mark one:

- **Ask WIZE in chat** — e.g. "Save this as our tone & style" or "Use this About Us everywhere." WIZE marks the document for you.
- **From the document search tab** — right-click a document (or open its three-dot ⋮ menu) and choose **Mark as Guide**.
- **From File Settings** — open the document, click the gear (**File Settings**) in the toolbar, and check **Use as Guide**.

Guides show a **book icon** next to their name on tabs and in the document search tab. In the document search tab you can also click the **book-icon filter** to show only your Guides.

## Getting WIZE to write in your voice

Land here because a draft sounds off — too formal, too generic, not you? The fix is almost always the Tone & Style document.

**The most common reason writing sounds "off":** your Tone & Style document still reflects the general starter template, not your actual writing. Uploading writing samples into your file library does **not** automatically update it — WIZE won't read those files and revise your style guide on its own. You have to ask for that step.

**Step 1 — Ask WIZE to update your Tone & Style document.**
In a chat, share a few writing samples and say something like: "Here are some writing samples I want you to use to update my Tone & Style document." WIZE analyzes them and revises the document.

**Step 2 — Confirm it's saved as a Guide.**
In the document search tab, find the Tone & Style document and check for the **book icon** (or use the book-icon filter to list Guides). If it isn't a Guide yet, open its three-dot ⋮ menu and choose **Mark as Guide**, or open the document and check **Use as Guide** in **File Settings**.

**Step 3 — Test it, then refine.**
Ask WIZE to write something short. If it's still not right, give it one more example: "This is closer to my tone. Update the Tone & Style document to reflect this." WIZE uses what you paste as a sample on the spot.

**Tips:**

- Three to five samples from your most common channel (usually donor emails) is plenty.
- Be specific about what's wrong — "too formal," "sounds like a press release." WIZE can adjust on that alone.
- Separate Guides per channel are fine — e.g. one for social posts, one for donor letters.