4 Useful Slack Features You May not Be Using Yet

Slack has been keeping offices and organizations humming along since all the way back in 2013. And while it might not quite have fully replaced email, it’s certainly made an impact for business teams working together.

The software has gained a lot of new features across the decade-plus that it’s been around, and in the hectic day-to-day hustle of working life, you’d be forgiven if you haven’t kept track of them all. With that in mind, I thought it would help to highlight four of the most useful features Slack has gained recently.

From Canvases to Lists, you should be able to take advantage of at least one of these tips, and improve your Slack experience. With the time you save, perhaps you could turn your attention back to achieving inbox zero.

Create a Canvas

You can create all kinds of documents with Slack Canvases.

Open up Slack on the web or desktop, click the More link on the left, then choose Canvas: You can then create a new document inside Slack, combining text, images, links to other areas of Slack, file attachments, and more. It’s like having Google Docs or Notion built into Slack, and you can use Canvases in all kinds of ways.

At the most basic level, you can just jot down some notes that you need to refer to. If you’re off on vacation and you need to leave instructions about how everything is going to work in your absence, that can be saved inside a Canvas document rather than left in a channel or a conversation thread.

With the ability to add rich media and other elements though, you can easily upgrade your Canvas to create a team newsletter, a product brief, or a technical document. Sharing, tagging, and collaboration tools are built right into the Slack Canvas feature, which means you’re able to easily grant edit access to other people on your team so you can work on them together.

There’s a Canvas button in the top-right corner of Slack channels and Slack conversations too, giving you even more ways to use the feature. You can use these Canvases to record important notes from a chat, for example, or to create a checklist document that everyone in a particular channel can refer to.