Drawing diagrams with Excalidraw

Some ideas are easier to understand drawn than described: a sequence of steps, a workshop layout, a relationship between several elements. Excalidraw is a whiteboard built into the back office that lets you draw this kind of diagram without leaving Beedeez and without an account on an external service. The drawing is saved as an image in your media library, and it stays editable afterwards.

⚠️ Prerequisite: the Excalidraw integration must be enabled in the account configuration. While it is not, Excalidraw appears neither in the media picker nor in the media library.

Enabling the Excalidraw integration

Enabling applies to the whole account. It is done by an administrator with access to the configuration.

1. Open your account configuration.
2. Open the Integrations section, then the External Services page.
3. Enable the Excalidraw service.
4. Save the configuration.

Excalidraw then becomes available to everyone who creates content. Unlike Canva, it requires no external account from the authors.

Creating a diagram

Excalidraw is offered wherever you can insert an image: a capsule visual, an image placed inside a capsule, a track visual, or an image used to customise the application.

1. From the place where you want to insert the image, open the media picker.
2. Open the Create a new visual tab.
3. On the Excalidraw card, click Edit with Excalidraw. The whiteboard opens in a window.
4. Draw inside the dotted frame. That frame marks the format expected for the place you are filling.
5. Click Save. The image is added to your media library and placed where you started.

To close the whiteboard without keeping your work, click Quit without save.

The dotted frame and the help text that comes with it are guides only: they are not saved in the final image.

💡 Tip: keep your drawing well inside the frame. Anything that spills out falls outside the expected format and may be cut off in the resulting image.

Reopening an existing diagram

A diagram created with Excalidraw from the back office stays editable: Beedeez keeps the drawing itself, not only the image it produced. You therefore do not have to draw it again to correct a label or move an arrow.

1. From the place that uses the visual, open the media picker again.
2. In the Image in use section, click Edit with Excalidraw. The whiteboard reopens your diagram exactly as you left it.
3. Make your changes, then click Save.

The Edit with Excalidraw button appears only on an image created with Excalidraw from the back office. An image imported from your computer, even one drawn in Excalidraw elsewhere, cannot be reopened this way.

The same section offers Resize image if you only want to reframe the visual without reopening the whiteboard.

Finding your diagrams in the media library

Images created with Excalidraw are saved in the media library, like any other image. Two markers help you tell them apart:

• the integration type filter offers Excalidraw creations, which displays only these images;
• the Excalidraw icon appears on the thumbnail of each image concerned.

Both markers disappear if the integration is disabled on the account.

Choosing between Excalidraw and Canva

Both tools are offered in the Create a new visual tab, but they answer different needs.

Excalidraw suits the explanatory diagram drawn by hand: a sequence of steps, a layout, a relationship between several elements. It is available as soon as the integration is enabled, with no external account, and the diagram can be reworked directly in Beedeez.

Canva suits a visual laid out from graphic templates. It does require a Canva account for each author: the Canva card gives access to your Canva library so that you can import an existing design. A visual imported from Canva also stays editable from Beedeez.

💡 Tip: the Excalidraw rendering is deliberately hand-drawn. For a visual that has to follow a precise brand identity, a layout tool is a better fit.

💡 Tip: a very busy diagram becomes hard to read on a small screen. Limit the number of elements and prefer several simple diagrams to a single dense one.

Going further

• The media library: where to find, rename and reuse the images created with Excalidraw.
• Designing visuals with Canva: the other visual creation tool available in the media picker.