Getting Started

Welcome to Dropbox Dash beta! With Dash, you’ll be able to quickly and easily find, organize, and share all your content so you can focus on the work that matters most. Learn the basics to stay focused and in control of your content.

Start with apps

Dash searches, gathers, and summarizes content across all your apps, tabs, emails, and docs—no matter where they live. Start by adding the work apps you use most often to Dash.

To add an app, click the ‘Add apps’ icon at the top right of your screen.

To get the most out of Dash, we recommend adding a combination of your most commonly used apps for:

• File storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive)
• Email (Gmail, Outlook)
• Calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar)

Sync your content

Your apps will immediately start syncing your most recent content once you add them. Syncing all your content can take between 30 minutes to a few hours depending on how much content you have.

After the first time you sync your content, Dash will continuously sync to make sure your content is kept up to date. For more detail on how syncing works, see: How Dash syncs my data

Try a search

To begin, start typing keywords like “content ideas” or “weekly planning”. After you’ve added apps, you can start searching content across all of them at once. And Dash doesn’t just search titles, it searches within the content as well—so you don’t need to know the exact title to find what you need. Upcoming: Dash will soon also support the ability to search for natural language or questions about your content.

When you search, you can either access relevant content via autocomplete results as you type and immediately jump to what you’re looking for, or press ‘Enter’ to search Dash and see a full list of results.

Not finding what you’re looking for?

• Make sure you have added apps to Dash. To add apps, visit the Apps page
• If you have recently added your apps, Dash may still be syncing your content. You’ll get an email confirming when your apps are finished syncing.

Summarize, ask questions, and organize your results

Take quick actions on your content directly from your search results:

• Summarize the document
• Chat with Dash to ask questions about documents
• Add content to smart collections (called stacks) to organize your work across apps

Create your first stack

Dash uses stacks—smart, shareable collections of your files and links—to help you organize all your content. With stacks, you’re able to view your project docs, tasks, meetings, and more in one easy-to-find place. Use them to collaborate with your colleagues, clients, or anyone who needs access to the content in that stack.

To get started, click ‘Create stack’ on the home page or on any stacks page (accessible in the left menu bar). Once you name your stack, Dash will suggest content to add. You can also add content by using the search bar or pasting links inside a stack. Once you’ve added what you want to your stack, you can organize your content into different sections.

‍

Stacks can be useful for a whole range of things—easily sharing project content to keep the entire team up-to-date, sharing work with clients, or collecting and organizing ideas to help brainstorming.

Here are some more ways to use stacks:

• Project hubs: Create shared team project hubs with task trackers, important docs, and meetings—all in one place
• Docs for review: Keep daily trackers of docs that teammates need reviewed
• Wikis: Create team or company-wide wikis for things like ‘New hire onboarding’ or ‘Requesting time off’
• To read: Keep track of articles and content to read this week

Adding content to a stack will not automatically give members of the stack access to each piece of content. Dash respects the access permissions already put in place for each connected app. See more under the How does Dash protect my data? section.