Documents Overview

Documents in Obvious work like Google Docs or Notion pages — a place to write, with rich formatting and collaboration built in. They live in the same project as your data, which means a document and a workbook can actually talk to each other.

What you can put in a document

The editor handles standard rich text formatting — headings, lists, links, code blocks, tables, blockquotes — and a few things spreadsheets and word processors typically can't do.

Embedded charts

The agent can create Plotly charts from your sheet data and embed them directly in a document. Charts are snapshots — when your data changes, ask the agent to regenerate the chart and the document reflects the new numbers. A report with an embedded chart is less work to maintain than one with screenshots.

Task checkboxes

Any list item can become an interactive checkbox. Click to check it off. Useful for action items, review checklists, and anything where you want to track completion without building a whole workbook for it.

Cover images

Add a banner image to any document — generated by the agent or pulled from an external URL. It shows up at the top of the document and in preview thumbnails across the project.

Embeds

YouTube, Loom, Vimeo, Spotify, Figma, CodePen, CodeSandbox, Google Docs, and other external content can be embedded inline. Paste the URL and the editor handles the rest.

Comments

Highlight any span of text and leave a threaded comment. Collaborators can reply, resolve, and see all open comments in the thread panel. Comments attach to the specific text they reference, not just to the document as a whole.

Mentions

Type @ anywhere in a document to mention an artifact or a person. Artifact mentions create live references — useful for linking related documents and workbooks within the same project.

Collapsible sections

Wrap content in a details block to create a section that expands on click. Useful for long documents where most readers need only a subset of the content.

Slash commands

Type / anywhere to insert structured content quickly: a table, a divider, a date, a code block with syntax highlighting. Faster than hunting through a toolbar.

The agent and documents

Documents are one of the artifact types the agent creates and edits directly.

Ask the agent to draft a document — "write a report summarizing the Q4 data in this workbook" — and it creates one, embedded chart and all. Ask it to edit an existing document — "make the executive summary tighter and add a section on risks" — and it edits in place. You can go back and forth, refining as you go, the same way you'd work with a collaborator who has fast turnaround and no ego about their first draft.

For collaborative documents with multiple reviewers, comments are the mechanism. Leave a comment flagging a section, and the agent can see and respond to comments the same way a human collaborator would.

Next steps

• Writing with Markdown — The full syntax reference for formatting, shortcuts, and what's supported in the Obvious editor.

• Collaboration and Comments — How to leave, reply to, and resolve comments, and how to use mentions to connect documents to people and artifacts.

• Embedding Charts — How to create charts from sheet data and embed them in a document.