The window at a glance

Five areas, always in the same places. Learn where they are once and the rest of the manual is a matter of detail.

The five areas

Area	Where	What it is for
Top bar	Across the top	The File menu, the tools, the document's name, undo and preview, what you are looking at, preflight, Export .riv, and the Design / Animate switch
Left sidebar	Down the left	Four sections: the Hierarchy of objects, the Data the graphic is driven by, the Assets it carries, and its Animations
Stage	The middle	Where you draw and arrange. Every artboard is here, side by side
Inspector	Down the right	Everything about what is selected. It changes completely with the selection
Timeline	Along the bottom, in Animate mode	When things change. With Animation States open, its graph takes this place

Design and Animate

The switch at the right of the top bar changes what the window is for.

• Design is for building: drawing, arranging, binding. Changes are the graphic's starting point.
• Animate is for movement: the stage gets a blue frame and a tag naming what you are animating, and the timeline opens along the bottom. With auto-key on — the red dot — moving something on the stage writes a key.

Making room

• Drag the edge of any panel to resize it; sidebar sections fold to their headers. See Arranging the panels.
• Ctrl+\ hides both side panels for a bigger stage, and brings them back.
• The editor remembers your arrangement for next time.

Help where you are

A small ? sits in the title of each dialog, on each inspector section's header, and beside each preflight finding. Click it, "Open this in the manual", and your browser opens the page about that very thing. File › Manual opens the manual at its start.

See also

• Your first scene
• The interface, panel by panel