Basics of Miro
This video by Tevo Saks will give you a great overview of the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o872SSuT2so
Miro is digital whiteboard that can help you collaborate with others. With the help of Miro you can create live projects that you and your team can work on it simultaneously. This guide will explain the basics of Miro, from creating an account to navigating on Miro.
Signing Up
When you first go to Miro Sign Up page you will see the below screen.
Enter the necessary information to sign up. If you use a work email you will have to activate your account using the confirmation code sent to you. After creating your account, it will prompt you to a page to create your profile and team. The page is shown below. Answers below are given as an example, change them accordingly.
After this Miro will ask you to if you want to add teammates to the team you have just created. You can skip this part if you will not have any collaborators or you can always invite people later.
Finally, it will ask you for what purpose you will be using Miro. You can also skip this part and start using the tool. For the sake of this guide, we will be selecting ‘Ideation and Brainstorming’. Again, this selection does not matter down the road, you can always use your board for other purposes as well.
First Steps
After this signing up process, you are ready to start using Miro. It will welcome you with the board it has created (named My First Board) and the templates it has.
Since we have selected ‘Ideation and Brainstorming’ during the sign-up process it has selected a few recommended templates. You can use any of the custom templates for your board. There are so many alternatives to choose from. In the left-hand side, you can see that templates have been categorized according to their use cases. We will be using ‘Mind Map’ for this guide. When you hover your mouse above the template it will show you two options; Use and Preview. Click Preview here so that you can see the details of it before using. Preview will show you this;
When you choose the Preview option you can see how the template looks, what it does and some alternatives to it. These are same for any template you have chosen. You can add this template to your board as blank or as pre-filled. For better understanding I will be adding pre-filled template.
You can edit practically everything you see in the above screenshot. You can edit the texts, change the locations of categories, add more information to anything by simply clicking the plus signs next to the items and so on. This information is valid for all the templates you see in Miro.
Using the Board
After the template is applied and when you start playing around the board, it will show you how you will zoom in and out, and how you will move around. For the new user moving in the board can take some time of getting used to. You will use mouse’s right click to grab the page and move around. You can select the items with left click. You can change the behavior of the left click by clicking the mouse from the tool list in the left side of the board, shown in the below screenshot.
This tool list will be your best friend while using Miro. You can find templates, sticky notes, arrows, etc. Below screenshot shows you a mind map, a flowchart and a sticky note. Under that you can see how an active Miro board is seen (Littlefish’s own Miro board; Action).
Useful Links
Miro itself has very useful YouTube channel. You can see two of them that will be helpful what this guide has talked about.
You can also ask us anything you want about Miro from our Discord server.
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