Canvas
VizChat's core workspace — the surface a document is composed on, holding widgets that the AI reads and writes directly.
What Canvas is
Canvas is the surface a VizChat document is composed on. It holds widgets — the content units — and VizChat layers an AI-first interaction model on top: widget content is generated and edited by the agent, and you steer it from the chat.
A canvas always belongs to a document, and a document is one of two types:
- Storyboard — step-by-step slides with narration, for explaining something in sequence
- Dashboard — a single static layout on an infinite surface, for seeing everything at once
The type is chosen when the document is created and does not change afterwards. See Canvas overview for the full comparison.
The document is the source of truth
A document is stored as YAML. That YAML — not the rendered pixels — is what the AI reads and writes: when you ask it to "change the second bar chart to stacked", the agent locates that exact field by path and patches it, then re-validates the document.
A storyboard's YAML is organised around its slides, plus document-level config (title, theme, aspect ratio, widget defaults) and pinned widgets that persist across every slide. A dashboard's YAML instead holds a flat set of widgets with their positions and sizes.
The building blocks
Widget
Each widget is an independent rectangular unit on the canvas — a chart, a maths figure, a table, a rich-text block, a PDF viewer, an embedded page, an infographic, or a custom widget built for your workspace. Widgets carry their own data and configuration, and each one defines its own fields and operations.
See what a widget is and the widget types overview.
Slide
Slides exist in storyboards. A slide is one step of the presentation: it decides which widgets are active, what is said as narration, and what happens on screen at that step.
How it compares
- vs. Notion — Notion is a linear block document; VizChat composes on a canvas and can present it as a narrated sequence.
- vs. Tableau — Tableau is data-source-centric; VizChat is chat-centric, and data is one kind of widget among many.
- vs. Figma — Figma targets design mockups; VizChat targets explaining and reporting, and every widget is a live interactive object.