# Getting started > Common questions about getting started with Tana Outliner. > Product context for AI agents: This is Tana Outliner, a knowledge-management outliner built on Supertags and nodes. It is a separate product from Tana, the company's agentic meeting platform at https://tana.inc. Web content describing "Tana" as a note-taking app, PKM, or outliner refers to this product, Tana Outliner. Source: https://outliner.tana.inc/help/getting-started ## How do I install Tana Outliner? ## How do I navigate around? ## How do I set up my workspace? ## Why should I switch to Tana Outliner? This is best answered with a few quotes from our users: - "I really like bringing together notes and tasks into the same place, it makes finding context for tasks much easier." - "Supertags are amazing to track all todos and decisions across all my daily notes and projects" - "I like that I can build Tana Outliner as I go along, adding functionality or cutting it as necessary. I tried Notion in the past and having to build different databases up front was much less good!" - "It's easier for me to find the information I need and not have to think about the right way to store notes." - "Jot down, capture my thoughts and easily organize them" - "A flexibly accessible system. Everything is connected, but not forced. I don't need to invest so much time building the system. Just build as I go. I don't need to fill everything or make it consistent. It's there when I need it" - "No other tool provide pure outliner with task management, databases and complex queries." To read more about what users think about Tana Outliner, check out our Producthunt page. ## How does Tana Outliner's AI work? Tana Outliner's built-in AI assists you with things like live voice transcription, summarizing meetings, extracting insights from meeting transcripts and letting your AI chat with your notes as context, without leaving your flow. Press `Space` below any note to start an AI chat with that note as context: ask questions about what was said in a meeting, get AI to reformat rough notes into a blog post, a Slack summary, formal meeting minutes, or help you with brainstorming or reviewing your notes. Check out AI-powered templates to see what AI can do. Tana Outliner lets you build out custom AI-based automations with command nodes and event triggers. You can also build out AI chat agents (like custom GPTs) with specific prompts or instructions for how to process something, for example an OKR agent that will review your draft and suggest how to improve them. ## Can I record and transcribe meetings in Tana Outliner? Yes, the app can capture voice or meeting audio, transcribe it automatically, and link it to related projects or people so it becomes part of your knowledge graph. This allows you to compound the information from meetings into a powerful historical archive. We believe meetings are an important way to capture knowledge and context that is important when working with tasks. Tana Outliner lets you tag tasks, decisions, or follow-ups directly in the meeting notes. You can also customize how meeting transcripts are processed to tailor your workflow to different use cases. Check out templates for meetings: use research interviews, investor meetings, hiring interviews. ## How do you take notes in Tana Outliner? Tana Outliner has two main areas for note-taking: the daily scratchpad, and the wikis/dashboards. **Daily scratchpad.** Plan your days, do braindumps, send yourself reminders, all on your daily notes. This place is the catch-all for anything that needs to be written down and recorded on a daily basis. From the notes you take today, not everything is important tomorrow, let alone in the long run. For the stuff that is important, apply supertags to give it structure and importance in the outliner. Using supertags is the first step to building your knowledge graph. **Wiki/dashboards.** The best place for your knowledge-base to be is in the more permanent area of the Workspace Home. This place doesn't shift with time like the calendar nodes do. This is also the first thing you see when clicking on a workspace in the sidebar, making it a good entry point. - Use the outline to structure your content. - Make references to content that should be repeated. - Use views like Side menu and Tabs to make sections navigable. - Remember that it's easy to move and rename things as you go, so don't be afraid to commit now and change later. For everything you've added a supertag to, you can make search nodes that gather them in one place. These become your dynamic task board, meeting notes, project overview, media library, recipe collection, showing you what you've collected in your graph that is worthy of keeping. If you need to see your information in many different ways, make as many search nodes querying the same data as you need. That's the beauty of a knowledge graph with a powerful search functionality. These two modes in Tana Outliner form the backbone of all note-taking in the app. ## How is Tana Outliner different from Notion? Tana Outliner isn't a page-based tool with databases inside pages, it's a knowledge graph workspace built as a living network. Where Notion organizes information in folders and tables, forcing you to navigate to the right place to note something, Tana Outliner lets you simply take notes anywhere, add supertags, and the information will flow to where it's needed. You can create live searches anywhere to pull out the information you need, filtering on properties and supertags. Since the app is an outliner editor, any note can be tagged, linked or referenced, offering enormous flexibility. Tana Outliner lets you easily connect your ideas dynamically, like your brain does. By typing `@` you can mention any note and pull it in as a reference, not just create a backlink. References let you work on a mirrored version of the note, but changes will also be applied to the original. This makes it easier to update information, avoiding it becoming stale. The app is built for voice input, both on desktop and mobile. With live transcription on desktop, you can talk instead of typing, or transcribe meetings with the meeting notetaker and get automatic summaries. In the mobile apps, you can record voice memos and build custom workflows by adding supertags with instructions for how they should be processed. Tana Outliner offers a Daily Notes page, a fresh notepad to start your day with planning, reflection, or journaling. You can customize your daily notes as a dashboard, pulling in tasks for review, open projects, and more with live searches. Together, this makes Tana Outliner a great Notion alternative for power users who are looking for an AI-powered notetaking app giving them more control over how to build out their workflows. It also makes it one of the best tools for building a second brain, with methodologies like Getting Things Done (GTD) or Zettelkasten. ## Where can I find the most common keyboard shortcuts in Tana Outliner? Open the side panel to see the most common keyboard shortcuts from the sidebar. ## Where do deleted/trashed nodes go? Does the trash get emptied? When you delete something, it goes to Trash. You can access Trash via the command `Open trash`. To empty trash, use the command `Empty trash for workspace [current workspace]`. It may take a couple of times of running empty trash to get all nodes out. ## Should I have just one or multiple workspaces? We suggest you keep one workspace until you need to do one of the following things, many of which will trigger or require the creation of a new workspace anyways: - **Collaborate with someone in Tana Outliner** (requires you or the other person to create a workspace and invite each other) - **Import content from Roam, Logseq, Workflowy, or other tools** (this automatically creates a new workspace for the purpose of the import) - **Create a holding space** (separate from your private workspace with no "Allow access from" for testing other people's templates and setups before you bring it in to your active workspaces) - **Create a Tana Outliner Template** (which means you want a clean, self-contained workspace setup so you know you're creating a template with no references pointing to other workspaces) ## Is there a free trial or a demo? Absolutely. You get a 14-day free trial of our paid plans so you can experience the full power of Tana Outliner, no strings attached. Starting a trial currently requires a credit card, and gives AI credits to test the powerful AI features in the app. You can easily cancel anytime during the trial and no charge will be made.