The Toolbar
Metro Retro's tools are designed for productivity, interaction, and fun!
There are two main categories of tools:
- 1.Board editing tools like shapes, text tool, and zones.
- 2.Collaboration tools like sticky notes and the marker pen.
All the tools!
The "Start Meeting' button is at the top of the toolbar. Use it to enable meeting controls, including private writing, a timer, polls, anonymous mode, choosing participant tools, and the ready check functionality.
Start Meeting button
The person that starts a Meeting becomes the Host, and everyone else becomes a participant. Participants are unable to unlock the board layout or use the meeting controls. The Host can add other people on the board as co-Hosts.
Sticky notes are the main object you'll use in Metro Retro. Double-click anywhere on the board to create a sticky note, or use the toolbar to pick the color first. Note - on some templates, the color of a sticky note can be overridden by a zone's color settings.
Sticky note facts:
- There are two sizes of sticky note: regular and big. To change the size of a sticky note, drag the right-hand edge outward.
- Each sticky is associated with its creator - hover over a sticky note to see who made it. (Use Anonymous mode to prevent the creator being associated with the sticky note).
- Each person has a different handwriting style when writing sticky notes. Change your handwriting style in your Preferences.
- When in Meeting mode, each person can hide and reveal their sticky notes as they wish, all at the same time or individually.
- You can write, vote, add reactions, draw on, and group sticky notes.
These are just like real-life Index cards. Use these to write more text than fits on a sticky note. You can also stamp reactions, draw and vote on Index cards.
Private writing works with Index cards - you can hide and reveal anything you're writing, while a Meeting is running.
Index cards can be expanded - drag from the bottom of the card to make it longer.
Task Cards are cards that you can write in, but they have separate title and body fields.
Task cards are similar to sticky notes, except they do not have private writing and can't be grouped with the Topic tool:
Use the Topic tool to group similar stickies. It helps organize sticky notes into themes.
To use a topic: Open the Topic tool, choose a color, and click to add to the board. Write the name of the topic inside, and then drag sticky notes toward it. The Topic will group the sticky notes. To ungroup sticky notes, just drag them out of the group.
You can pickup a topic and it will take any grouped stickies with it.
Use Topics to group sticky notes
Tokens look similar to poker chips and have a variety of uses. Drag them onto the board to use them. There are blank tokens (double click to edit) or pre-made tokens with emotes, numbers, words, and even ones with your team pictures! For a wider range of tokens, you can stamp emojis onto a token using the reaction tool.
You can use Tokens in a range of activities - icebreakers, estimation, team health checks, planning poker, and workshops.
Use tokens for a range of purposes
Your team tokens are at the bottom of the drawer!
Zones are the primary object for laying out your board sections.
Zones can be any size, they have a title and emoji field, and can override the color of sticky notes inside them.
Click in the top left or on the edge of a zone to select it.
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NEW - You can also set a zone to not over-ride the color of the sticky notes it contains
You can add shapes to your board, with a range of styles.
You can add arrows as shapes to your boards. They can be found in the shape menu.
Drag-and-drop or copy-paste images directly on to your boards, but you can also use the image tool to search through a free image library, or add images by their URL.
Once an image has been added to the board, it can be resized and moved.
Reaction emojis can be stamped on almost any object. Pick your reaction and click where you want to place it!
To remove a reaction, right-click on the stamped reaction when the reaction tool is equipped.
The Voting tool allows you to hold a group vote. You can vote on stickies, topics, index cards, and task cards.
To start a voting round, click the Voting tool in the toolbar, then click the 'Start Voting Round' button that appears in the bottom left. Choose how many votes each person gets, and if they can vote on the same item twice. Once you start the round, ask everyone to equip the voting tool and to vote on their choices by clicking on them.
Voting round options
To view the voting results, use the ranking results button in the bottom left. You can choose to view ranks for individual stickies, or for the topic total. This sums up all votes on the topic itself as well as the stickies inside the topic.
View vote rankings
Sometimes a team member can start a voting round accidentally. If this occurs, it freezes the previous round's votes for everyone. You can remove the accidental voting round by either deleting the voting round, or the person who created it presses the undo button (Ctrl + Z).
You can attach comments to sticky notes, task cards, and index cards.
Comments on a sticky note
Draw on zones, shapes, sticky notes, and index cards with the marker pen. It draws directly on the object. To erase pen markings, hold right-click and wipe over the markings.
Gestures are visual functions that appear above the board but do not affect the content. They are for presenting ideas and interacting with your colleagues. There are four functions in the Gestures menu:
A ping is an arrow you drop on the board to point at something. Click once to drop a single arrow or click-and-drag to highlight over an area.
Off-screen pings are shown at the side of your screen. Click an on active ping to be taken to where it is pointing.
Tip - you can drop a ping on the board at any time by pressing the Tab key. An arrow will appear at your cursor's positon.
The vanishing pen lets you draw a temporary annotation on the board. It is useful for drawing attention to items on the board without permanently drawing on them.
Fire confetti across the board with the confetti cannon!
🎉
There may be imitations, but this is the original. Click and drag to aim, then release to fire confetti. We won't lie, it's kind of addictive.
Pick this option to throw your hat across the board, of course. Similar to the confetti, click and drag to aim, then release to throw the hat.
Tip - in order to throw a hat you must be wearing one, so pick a hat to wear by clicking on your avatar in the top right:
Choose from a selection of hats
- 1.Press the
Hkey to bring you back to the center of the board. - 2.Press the
Tabkey to drop a ping arrow. - 3.Press the
Wkey to open the Gestures menu, then press a1-4key to select the appropriate gesture.
Last modified 19d ago