How do I schedule a meeting and build its agenda?

How do I schedule a meeting?

From the Meetings page, choose Schedule meeting and fill in the details below — or switch to the Poll members for a time tab to let members pick the time instead (availability polls). Whatever you've already typed that both tabs share — title, type, time zone, locations, description — carries over when you switch tabs, in either direction.

A meeting scheduled by promoting an availability poll's winning slot always records which poll it came from: its Details page shows a Scheduled from line naming the poll, linking straight back to that poll's own summary — including the full response roster — so anyone can see why the meeting landed on the date it did. A meeting scheduled directly (never polled) shows no such line.

• Title and meeting type — Board meeting, Committee meeting, Annual general meeting, or Special meeting. When you choose Committee meeting, a Committee picker appears and you must choose which committee the meeting belongs to (create committees first on the Committees page). Scoping a meeting to a committee makes its attendance roster and quorum use that committee's members — not the whole board — and shows the committee, with a link, on the meeting's detail page and in the meetings list. Switching the type back to Board (or any other type) clears the committee link.

• Time zone, plus starts, duration, and ends — times are always shown in the meeting's own time zone, not the viewer's, so everyone's looking at the same wall-clock time regardless of where they are. Time zone defaults to your board's own timezone (set on the Board profile tab), falling back to UTC if your board hasn't set one — and stays fully editable per meeting. Starts opens prefilled to the next top of the hour in that zone, and duration to your board's default meeting length (set on the Meetings settings tab or during board setup), so ends is always filled in from the moment the form opens. The three stay linked: change starts or duration and ends moves with them; set ends directly and duration recalculates to match. All three stay fully editable — the duration is just the link between the other two, and only starts/ends are saved on the meeting.

• Location — a physical location, a virtual join link, or both. At least one is required: a meeting has to say how members are meant to attend it, so BoardTools won't let you save one with neither (the same applies when you edit a meeting later). The physical location prefills from your board's default meeting location, if one is set, and stays editable.

  What you fill in decides how the meeting is summarized everywhere it's listed:

  You fill in	Shown as
  A physical location only	In person — the place itself is shown
  A join link only	Virtual
  Both	Hybrid

  A meeting that somehow has neither — one scheduled before this rule existed, or generated from a standing schedule or availability poll that had no location on it — reads as Location TBD until someone adds one.

• Expected attendees — an optional planning estimate.

• RSVP by — an optional deadline override for this one meeting, shown on its Details and Attendance pages. Leave it blank and BoardTools works it out for you: your board's default number of days' notice (set on the Meetings settings tab), counted back from starts, kept in step automatically if you move the meeting later. Type a date instead to pin the deadline to exactly that — a pin you've set survives a later reschedule too, rather than being overwritten by the automatic calculation. A meeting scheduled from a poll or a standing schedule gets the same automatic deadline; a deadline that's already passed shows as "RSVP deadline passed" rather than a live prompt, so it never reads as if you're still on time to answer.

• Description — an agenda summary or notes for attendees.

• Recording — only shown once your board has turned on the meeting notetaker ( Settings → Meetings). Choose whether a BoardTools-branded bot joins this specific meeting's video call, and optionally tighten (never loosen) what it keeps for just this meeting — handy for an especially sensitive agenda. Turning it on or off is recorded in the Audit log.

A scheduled meeting can be edited or cancelled any time before it happens, and marked completed once it's happened (from its Details page) — both keep the meeting on the record rather than deleting it, and both can be undone. Edit stays available whatever the meeting's status, so you can still fix a title, a description, or a location on a meeting that's already been completed or cancelled. Cancelling it, or moving it to a different time or place, also tells everyone invited: see what the board hears when a meeting is cancelled or moved. Moving a meeting to a new time also keeps its RSVP by deadline in step — unless you've pinned an explicit one on that meeting (see RSVP by above), BoardTools recalculates the deadline from the NEW start using your board's current default, the same way it did when the meeting was first scheduled.

Can I undo cancelling or completing a meeting?

Yes — neither is a one-way door. On the meeting's Details page, whoever can manage meetings sees the matching undo in the same row of buttons:

• Reinstate meeting on a cancelled meeting puts it back to scheduled and re-invites everyone. Because cancelling it sent a calendar cancellation that removed the meeting from people's own calendars, putting it back means sending each person a fresh calendar invitation — so the event reappears in their diary rather than being lost. BoardTools asks you to confirm first, and says so plainly in the confirmation, because that part is visible to the whole board. Nothing else about the meeting changes: its agenda, RSVPs, documents, and history are all still there.
• Reopen meeting on a completed meeting puts it back to scheduled — for when a meeting was closed out early, or on the wrong row. Nobody is emailed and no calendars change, because completing a meeting never changed anyone's calendar in the first place.

Only the undo that applies is offered: a cancelled meeting offers Reinstate, a completed one offers Reopen, and a scheduled meeting offers Mark as completed and Cancel meeting instead. Both undos are recorded in the audit log ("Meeting reinstated" / "Meeting reopened"), with who did it and when, so the correction is part of the record rather than a silent edit.

How do I set up a standing meeting schedule?

If your board meets on a regular cadence — "the 2nd Tuesday of every month", a weekly staff check-in, an annual AGM — set it up once as a standing schedule instead of scheduling each occurrence by hand. This works for committee meetings too — the ones that most often recur — see A standing schedule for a committee below. On the Meetings page, find Standing series in the panel beside the list and choose New:

• Series name — an admin-facing label (e.g. "Monthly Board Meeting"); Meeting title is what every generated meeting is called.
• Meeting type — board, committee, AGM, or special. Choosing Committee meeting asks which committee (see below).
• Cadence — how often it repeats (weekly, monthly, or yearly) and every how many of that unit, then either a day of the week (e.g. "the 2nd Tuesday") or a specific day of the month (e.g. "the 15th"). A yearly cadence also picks its month. The anchor date seeds which week/month/year the cadence counts from. A day some months don't have (like the 31st) is simply skipped that month.
• Start time, duration, and time zone — every generated occurrence inherits these.
• Location (physical, virtual join link, or both), an optional agenda template to seed every generated meeting's agenda from (see Reuse a standard agenda), and a description.
• Auto-draft lead time (days) — how far ahead of each occurrence the meeting is drafted for you automatically. Leave it blank to use the default (14 days), or set your own per schedule.

The Standing series panel lists each schedule's cadence in plain language and its next computed occurrence. Select a schedule's name to open it, where you can change any of the above (and decide what that does to the meetings it has already drafted — see Editing a standing schedule), Pause it to stop it from creating new meetings without losing its configuration (Resume picks the cadence back up), or Generate next 12 to materialize its upcoming occurrences onto the Meetings list right now; re-running it never creates duplicates, so it's always safe to do again later.

A standing schedule for a committee

Set the schedule's Meeting type to Committee meeting and a required Committee picker appears — the same one the fixed-time meeting form uses. Every meeting the schedule generates then belongs to that committee, which means its attendance roster and quorum are the committee's members, and its reminders and notices go to the committee only — never the whole board. A monthly committee is now one schedule, not twelve meetings entered by hand.

A few things worth knowing:

• The committee is required for a committee series. There is no "committee meeting with no committee": that would quietly address every member of the board.
• If your board has no committees yet, the form says so and links to the Committees page — create the committee first.
• Changing an existing series from Committee meeting to another type clears its committee; changing it back asks you to pick one again. Upcoming meetings nobody has touched yet follow the change (see Editing a standing schedule); anything the board has already RSVPed to, attended, or edited keeps what it was created with.
• If the committee itself is deleted, its standing schedule is kept but stops generating new meetings, rather than quietly producing board-wide meetings under a committee label. Point the schedule at another committee (or change its type) to start it again.

Editing a standing schedule

Because a schedule drafts its next occurrence ahead of time (14 days ahead by default), there is almost always a real meeting on the Meetings list by the time you come to change the series. So when you open a schedule that has upcoming meetings nobody has touched yet, the form states exactly how many and offers — on by default — to apply the edit to them too:

Also update 3 upcoming occurrences

With it left on, saving carries the new start time, duration, title, time zone, location, and description onto those meetings, so the next meeting your directors are reminded about is the one the schedule says. If your change moves the cadence itself — Tuesdays to Wednesdays, monthly to quarterly — an upcoming date the new cadence no longer includes is cancelled rather than left on the calendar beside the new one, and the new date is drafted as usual. You'll see a short summary of what changed after the save, and it's all recorded in the Audit log.

"Nobody has touched yet" means exactly what it means on the delete confirmation: still scheduled, still in the future, with no RSVP or attendance recorded and no edits of its own. A meeting somebody has already moved, cancelled, RSVPed to, or attended is never rewritten by a change to the series — your one-off decision about that meeting wins.

Clear the checkbox if you'd rather the edit only affect meetings the schedule generates from now on. Meetings already generated then stay exactly as they are — you can still open any of them and change or cancel that one meeting by hand.

Renaming the series, changing its agenda template, changing its auto-draft lead time, and pausing or resuming it never touch an existing meeting.

Deleting a standing schedule

Got the cadence wrong, or reorganizing which committee meets when? Delete removes the schedule itself (found on its own edit page, and in the fuller standing-schedule list). Meetings it already generated are never deleted — they stay on the Meetings list exactly as they are, with their agenda, RSVPs, and minutes intact; they simply stop showing a series affiliation. If the schedule has any upcoming, still-scheduled meetings that nobody has RSVPed to, recorded attendance for, or edited yet, the confirmation offers a second, off-by-default choice to remove those too — the common case when an unwanted cadence left unwanted drafts behind — and states exactly how many that is before you confirm.

Occurrences draft themselves ahead of time

While a schedule is active, BoardTools auto-drafts its next occurrence for you — a scheduled meeting appears on the Meetings list once the occurrence is within the schedule's auto-draft lead time, carrying the schedule's meeting type, time, and location, with the linked agenda template already cloned onto it so you can start refining the agenda straight away. You don't have to press Generate for routine meetings; that's there for when you want to materialize several at once.

Every meeting that came from a standing schedule shows its series affiliation — "Part of: Monthly Board Meeting" — on the meetings list, the meeting's Details page, and the calendar, so it's always clear which cadence a meeting belongs to.

An auto-drafted occurrence also invites everyone, exactly as a meeting you schedule by hand does: each serving member (or, for a committee series, each committee member) gets the usual branded email with a calendar file attached, so the recurring meeting lands in their own calendar app. The same is true of a meeting created by promoting an availability poll's winning slot. See do meetings land on my own calendar automatically? for what a recipient sees and how they turn the calendar file off.

My recurring meetings never reached my calendar

Meetings created by a standing schedule or an availability poll before this was fixed were created without an invitation — so a board could be sitting on a whole series that never reached a single director's calendar. To put one right, open the meeting and choose Send calendar invites, next to Add to calendar on its Details page. It emails everyone serving on the meeting a calendar invitation for it, in one step, and the send is recorded in the audit log as "Calendar invites sent".

A few things worth knowing:

• It's offered only where it can still help: a scheduled meeting that has never had an invitation deliberately sent. Once you've used it, the button retires — from then on, editing the meeting's time or place re-invites everyone automatically, as it always has.
• Anyone who somehow already has the meeting sees it update rather than gain a duplicate.
• It works whether or not your board has set a contact email: that address is only ever the reply-to on board email, never a requirement.
• Only people who can manage meetings see it.

Auto-drafting is safe to leave running: it never creates duplicates, and editing one drafted meeting — rescheduling it to a different time, or cancelling it — only affects that one occurrence. The schedule itself, and every other occurrence, are left exactly as they were.

Where do past meetings go?

Once a meeting has happened it moves from the Upcoming group to the Past group on the Meetings page — nothing is deleted, so the full record stays available. Because a long-running board builds up a lot of history, the Past group is split into pages (20 meetings each): use the Previous page / Next page links and the "Page 1 of N" count beneath it to move through them. The page you're on lives in the address, so you can bookmark or share a link to a specific page, and any search or filter you've applied stays in effect as you page (it all works with JavaScript off, too). The Upcoming group is never paged.

How do I build the agenda?

Open a meeting and go to its Agenda tab. Add items one at a time, each with:

• A type — Information, Discussion, Decision, or Consent (a decision item is the natural place to attach a motion; see Votes & ballots).
• An optional presenter, time-box, and attached documents from your document library.

Reorder items with the up/down controls on each row, or — with a mouse or on a touch screen — drag an item by its grip handle (the dotted handle on the left of each row) to a new spot. The up/down buttons and drag do the same thing, so use whichever suits you; the up/down buttons stay available for keyboard use. Choose Edit on any item to change its title, type, presenter, time-box, or description in a side panel — the rest of the list stays put while you edit. Choose the paperclip Attach button on an item to add a supporting document — see Add materials to a meeting below for what the two tabs do; remove an attached document with its Remove button. Related routine items (like approving prior minutes) can be grouped as a single consent agenda so the board can approve them together with one motion instead of one each.

All of this — adding items, reordering, editing, attaching documents, and grouping consent items — shows up only if your role lets you edit agendas; if it doesn't, you see the agenda exactly as built, without controls you can't use.

Approve a consent block with one vote

Select two or more routine items with their checkboxes and choose Group as consent. They become a numbered consent block — "Consent block 1" — shown as its own panel at the top of the agenda, listing the items it covers.

From that panel:

• Move the consent block opens one motion for the whole block. Its text comes pre-filled with the block's items in agenda order, and you can edit the wording, the threshold, and who moved and seconded it before you open it. This is an ordinary motion in every other respect: it appears on the meeting's Motions tab, directors vote on it there (or in Run mode), and recording the result enforces quorum and your board's threshold exactly like any other vote. The control appears only for a role that can open motions.
• Pull from block takes one item back out — the standard "I'd like that one taken separately, please" request. The item returns to the agenda as an ordinary discussion item and is excluded from the consent motion. Pull items before the block is moved: once a motion has been opened on it, BoardTools refuses the pull and asks you to withdraw that motion first, so the recorded motion never describes items it did not actually cover.

When the result is recorded, the outcome is written against every item in the block: each one is marked Approved by consent on the agenda, and each one's minutes decision line is filled in from that single result (your own wording, if you already typed a decision, is never overwritten). The decision register lists the items the consent motion covered.

The same panel appears in Run mode on any item that belongs to a block, so you can move the block from the surface you're actually running the meeting on.

Reuse a standard agenda

Choose Templates in the agenda's tool rail for three occasional-use actions. Like the editing controls above, Templates only appears for a role that can edit agendas.

Save current as template… and Apply template… capture and reapply the structure of an agenda — order, item type, time-box, description, and consent grouping. A template is deliberately meeting-agnostic: it never carries a presenter or a document attachment, because who presents and what's attached is specific to the meeting the template was saved from, not to the agenda shape itself.

Copy from a previous meeting… carries more. Pick a meeting from this board that has agenda items, and BoardTools shows you exactly what it will bring across — the item count, which items keep their presenter, and how many document attachments will come along — before you confirm anything. Unlike a template, a copy carries:

• the presenter on each item (dropped, with a named notice, if that member is no longer active on the board), and
• document attachments, linked to the same library document your prior meeting used — never a new, duplicate copy of the file.

Finding an older meeting. The Copy from list opens on your 25 most recent meetings, and says so when your board has more than that. To reach one further back — last year's AGM, say — type part of its title into Search previous meetings above the list; the search runs across every meeting your board has held, not only the ones already shown. Clear the search box to go back to the recent list. If nothing matches, the dialog says so plainly, which is a different message from the one you'd see on a board that has no previous meetings at all.

You choose whether the copied items are appended to the end of the current agenda or replace it entirely — that choice is always explicit; nothing is silently overwritten. Copying works even if this agenda is already published — it's treated like any other edit after publishing (see below): the "Edited since publishing" indicator picks it up, so it's never a silent change.

When to use which: save a template for a recurring agenda shape you'll reuse indefinitely (a standing monthly board meeting, for instance — see How do I set up a standing meeting schedule? above). Copy from a previous meeting when this month's agenda is mostly last month's, presenters and attachments included.

Publish the agenda

Publish records that the agenda is final, timestamped in the meeting's own time zone. It's a separate permission from editing the agenda — a role that can build the agenda doesn't necessarily see Publish too, and vice versa.

Publishing doesn't notify anyone on its own — the board is told about a meeting when you finalize its board packet, which is what directors actually read. See Send the packet to the board below.

Good governance tip: publish your agenda a few days ahead of the meeting — most bylaws require advance notice, and it gives members time to read attached documents before you're all in the room (or the call).

Publishing doesn't lock the agenda — anyone who can build it can keep adding, editing, reordering, or deleting items afterward. If you do, BoardTools says so plainly instead of leaving the old "Published" stamp looking current: the Agenda tab shows an Edited since publishing chip in the header, and the Publish card adds the same text next to a Republish agenda button. Choosing it re-stamps the published date and clears the chip — it's the same Publish action, just run again on an already-published agenda, so it never re-sends anything on its own (only finalizing the board packet notifies the board). If instead you'd rather stop editing until you deliberately reopen it, Revert to draft takes the agenda back to draft — Publish becomes available again once you're ready.

How do I add materials to a meeting?

There are two places a document can hang, and they answer different questions.

Materials on the meeting itself — the board pack for the sitting as a whole: a cover letter, last year's audited financials, a pre-read deck. Open the meeting's Details tab and choose Add material in the Materials card. Everything listed there goes into the compiled board packet and is readable by every member who can open the meeting.

Documents on one agenda item — the report the board discusses under item 4. Use the paperclip Attach button on that item in the Agenda tab. These appear beneath their item in the packet, as well as in the packet's document list.

Both controls open the same dialog, with two tabs:

• From the file cabinet — search your document library by title or tag and pick a document that's already there.
• Upload a file — choose a file from your computer (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, CSV, or images, up to 25 MB). Give it a title, or leave the title blank to use the file name, and optionally choose the library folder to file it in.

An upload does both things at once: the file is added to your document library as an ordinary, versioned document and attached here. So a file you add in a hurry the night before a meeting is still findable next year — you never have to visit the Documents page first, and the packet never contains a file that lives nowhere else.

Removing a material takes it out of this meeting's packet only. The document stays in the file cabinet; nothing is deleted.

Who added this, and when?

Every row in the Materials card says so underneath the document's title — "Added by Ada Lovelace · Mon, Jan 5, 2026, 2:00 PM EST" — in the meeting's own timezone, so "was this in the pack before I read it, or did it turn up last night?" is answerable from the screen. If the person who added it has since left the board, the row shows only the date and time rather than a name: the record of when survives the seat.

How do I change the order of the materials?

Use the Move up and Move down buttons on each row of the Materials card. They work with the mouse and from the keyboard alike — tab to a button and press Enter or Space — and each move is announced for screen readers. There is no drag-only path, so nothing here needs a steady hand.

The order matters: it is exactly the order the compiled board packet prints your materials in. A cover letter added last belongs at the front of the pack, and now it can go there without detaching and reattaching everything.

Reordering counts as a change to the meeting, so if a packet has already been compiled you'll see the usual "the agenda has changed since this packet was compiled" notice — regenerate the draft to pick up the new order. Nothing is regenerated or re-sent on your behalf, and a finalized version is never rewritten.

Who can do what? Adding, removing and reordering a meeting's Materials needs the same permission as editing the meeting. Attaching documents to agenda items needs the permission to edit agendas. Every member who can open the meeting can read everything attached either way.

What the board sees when voting

A meeting's materials are also listed on its Motions tab, above the motion list, and each motion shows What this motion is about — the documents attached to the agenda item that motion decides. Directors don't have to leave the voting screen to find out what they're approving.

How do I compile a board packet?

From a meeting's Board packet page, choose Generate to compile a single, branded PDF from that meeting's cover page, agenda, materials and attached documents, and prior minutes. The packet's document list puts the meeting's Materials first, in the order you arranged them, followed by anything attached to an individual agenda item — a document listed in both places appears once. You can regenerate the draft as things change, and finalize a version to snapshot it permanently — every version stays downloadable afterward.

Each version offers two ways to open it: Read opens the packet in an in-app reader you can page through with the on-screen buttons or your keyboard (arrow keys, Page Up/Down, Home/End) — the text stays selectable — and Download PDF saves the file to read or print offline.

Who can do what? Generate, Regenerate, Finalize and Notify the board need the same permission as editing the meeting itself — administrators, chairs, and staff liaisons. If you don't have it, you won't see those buttons. Reading the packet is open to any board member who can open the meeting: the current version and its status, the full version history with each version's distribution state, Read, and Download PDF are all still there.

Send the packet to the board

When you choose Finalize, the confirmation offers a Notify the board step, ticked by default. Leave it ticked and every member of the board gets a packet-ready notice — including someone who's been invited but hasn't taken up their sign-in yet, so an incoming member can prepare like everyone else. It arrives in their notifications bell and, unless they've turned that topic's email off, by email with a button straight to the packet. RSVP answers and attendance never affect who receives it. Each member's own notification preferences decide which of those they get; nobody can be opted back in by an administrator.

Untick it to finalize quietly. The version then reads Not distributed in the version history, with a Notify the board button beside it so you can send it whenever you're ready.

The version history shows the distribution state for every final version — either Sent to 9 members on 31 Jul 2026, 2:00 PM EDT or Not distributed — so you can always see what the board has actually received. Sending is recorded once per version: finalizing or re-sending the same version never notifies anyone twice, and each send is written to the audit log with the number of members it reached.

Every timestamp on the Board packet page — Generated and Sent to — is shown in the meeting's own time zone, with the zone named, so it always reads as the same clock the meeting's own date and time show one tab over.

Good governance tip: finalize and send the packet a few days before the meeting. Publishing the agenda proves you set the business; sending the packet proves the board had the papers.

Did the packet actually reach everyone?

"Sent to 9 members" means nine notices went out. It does not mean nine arrived — an address can have been closed, mistyped, or blocked since you last used it. Beneath the packet contents, the Did the packet reach everyone? section answers that for the most recently distributed version: one row per email, with the address it went to and what happened to it.

The headline is the number you want first — either No delivery problems reported or, for example, 1 of 9 emails did not arrive — followed by a roll-up such as "7 delivered · 1 sent · 1 bounced". Each row then shows:

• Recipient — the name and the exact address the notice was sent to. The address matters: it's what you'd correct on the member's record.
• Delivery — the status, in words. Anything that means the notice did not arrive also carries an explicit Did not arrive line and, where the mail provider gave one, the reason (for example "550 5.1.1 mailbox unavailable").
• Last update — when it was delivered, or when it was handed to the mail provider, in the meeting's own time zone.

What each status means to you:

If any row is not Delivered, reach that member another way — and fix the address on their member record so the next packet lands. Sent and Delivered are deliberately different words: the first only proves BoardTools handed the message over.

Some members addressed by a distribution may have no row here at all. The section says so plainly ("2 of the 9 members addressed have no email record here"). That happens when a member has switched this topic's email off in their own notification preferences — they were still told in the app — when their address was already blocked, or when an old queued message has since been cleared out. The distribution itself stays on the board's record either way.

Who can see this? Delivery outcomes are organizer-only, gated on the same permission as Generate, Finalize and Notify the board — one member's bounced address is not something the rest of the board sees.

Who has actually opened the packet?

"Sent to 9 members" tells you the papers went out; it doesn't tell you anyone read them. Beneath the packet contents, the Who has opened this packet section answers that: for every currently-serving member it shows whether they've opened the current version — Read it in app, Downloaded it, or both — how many times in total, and when they last did. A summary line gives you the headline — "3 of 9 members have opened v2 of this packet. 6 members have not yet." — which is the most useful thing to know a few days out from a meeting.

Each row shows:

• Member — their name, avatar, and role (and status, if they're on leave rather than fully active).
• Accessed via — one badge for each way that member has engaged with this version: Read in app, Downloaded, or both if they've done both. A member who neither read nor downloaded it shows an em dash here.
• Times opened — a count across both ways combined, or Not yet opened for someone who hasn't opened it at all. A member who has never opened it is always listed, never left off, so the roster answers "who still hasn't read the papers" as clearly as "who has."
• Last opened — the date and time of their most recent access by either route, in the meeting's own time zone, or an em dash if they've never opened it.

The roster describes one version at a time: it counts accesses of the current version only, because each finalize creates a new version, and someone who read v1 thoroughly hasn't necessarily looked at v2. Both the in-app Read reader and the Download PDF / Download links record an access here — a director who only ever downloads the packet is no longer reported as someone who hasn't read it.

Who can see this? The roster is organizer-only, gated on the same permission as Generate, Finalize and Notify the board. A member without it never sees it, and there's no member-facing surface that tells anyone "so-and-so read the packet." It's read-only information: there's no nudge or reminder attached to it (the document library's view roster works the same way, though it does not yet distinguish reading from downloading). If no packet has been compiled yet, or the board has no serving members, the section simply says so.

Highlight passages and leave notes while you read

While reading a packet in-app, select any passage of text to leave a note on it:

• With a mouse or trackpad, drag to select text, then choose Add note in the toolbar.
• With a keyboard, choose Select text (keyboard) to enter selection mode. Arrow keys move through the page's text, Space marks where your note should start, continuing to move extends the selection, and Enter opens the note composer (Escape cancels).

Type your note (or leave it blank to save just the highlight) and Save note. Notes are private by default — only you can see them. Every note already on the page you're viewing appears in the Notes on this page panel below the reader, showing the quoted passage and your note text.

Good governance tip: a private note is a good place to jot a question before the meeting so you don't lose the thought reviewing hundreds of pages — you can always find it again from the same page next time you open the packet.

Share a note with the board and reply to one

Choose Share with the board on any of your own notes to make it visible — with your name and when you wrote it — to every board member who opens that packet. Choose Make private on a note you've shared to take it back to just yourself; only you can toggle a note's sharing.

Once a note is shared, any board member with access to the packet can add a reply underneath it in the Replies section, building a threaded discussion right on the passage it's about. A note you keep private never appears to anyone else, in the notes panel or anywhere else in the app — only you ever see it or its replies.

Whenever someone replies to a shared note, its author and everyone else who has already replied get a notification so you know to go take a look — you won't be paged with one notice per reply if several land in quick succession while you're mid-conversation.

How do I add a meeting to my own calendar?

You don't usually have to: every meeting you're invited to already emails you a calendar file that lands on your own calendar app on its own — see do meetings land on my own calendar automatically? for what that does and doesn't cover, and where to turn it off.

Choose Add to calendar on any meeting to download that same file by hand instead — useful if you turned the automatic version off, or just want one particular meeting without waiting for its email. If you'd rather have your whole board calendar stay in sync automatically instead of per-meeting invites, see RSVPs & attendance for the personal subscription link — using both at once means seeing every meeting twice, so pick one.