Documents, Word files and decks
The three kinds of written deliverable and how much of each you can edit yourself.
Documents written from scratch
The most common kind. Asteria writes it, and you get three tabs:
Preview shows it formatted, as it will look. This is the default and where you will spend most of your time.
Edit is a rich editor. Click in and type: headings, bold, lists and links all behave the way you expect.
Markdown shows the underlying plain text. Useful if you already know Markdown, or want to paste the raw source somewhere else.
Changes are yours until you save. An Unsaved changes marker appears as soon as you touch anything, with Save beside it. If you try to close or navigate away with unsaved work, you get asked first, with Keep editing as the way back.
Discard changes throws away everything since your last save. It does not go back a version: it drops the edits you have made in this sitting. To go back further, use History.
Downloading
Download as Word, as PDF or as Markdown. Word for anything a colleague will edit, PDF for anything they should not, Markdown if it is heading into another tool.
Word documents you uploaded
Upload a .docx and ask for changes, and Asteria works on the actual file rather than rewriting it from scratch.
This matters if the document has a house style. Its formatting, tables, headers and footers survive, because only the text you actually change is rewritten. A regenerated document would have lost all of that.
The trade-off is that some changes cannot be made by typing:
- Text: edit it directly in the panel.
- Tables, headers, footers, styling: ask Asteria in the chat.
Occasionally a requested change cannot be applied to the file at all. You get told, and nothing is saved, rather than the document being silently mangled. Rephrase, or ask for a fresh document instead of an edit.
Uploading a PDF and asking for a Word document out of it may shift the visual layout. PDFs describe where ink goes on a page, not what is a heading and what is a caption, so some interpretation is unavoidable. The app warns you about this. Check the output before sending it on.
Presentations
Decks show as a preview: a slide gallery you can page through with Previous and Next.
You cannot edit slides in the panel, by design. A deck is built against your organisation's template, and hand-editing the preview would not touch the real file. Two ways forward:
Ask for changes. This is the good path, because the deck is rebuilt properly and you get a new version.
Cut slide 4. On the summary slide, lead with the recommendation rather than the method.
Download as PowerPoint and edit it there. From that point the file on your machine and the one in the Workshop are separate, so make the round of changes you want in the chat first, then download once.
PDF references
Sometimes a PDF is attached to a document as a reference rather than as something to edit. It is there to be read and cited. Ask Asteria about its contents in the conversation.