Importing a Tab

Import brings content into the active tab from pasted text or a file. It is the counterpart to exporting: export a tab from one document, import it into a tab somewhere else.

Import formats

Open the tab's menu (the ⋯ button on the active tab, or right-click the tab) and choose Import. You can also run Import… from the command palette. The Import to tab dialog opens with a card per format:

JSON reads a livediagram tab export (a .livediagram-tab.json file) and restores its elements exactly, the highest-fidelity round trip. Plan cards in the file are added to this document, along with any card types it doesn't have yet; cards the document already holds are left as they are, so importing a tab back into its own document never doubles them.
Mermaid reads a Mermaid flowchart (graph / flowchart), state diagram (stateDiagram), or ER diagram (erDiagram, its relationships drawn with crow's-foot ends at each table, and an entity's alias in square brackets, like BOOK_AUTHOR[Book author], used as its title) and lays it out on the canvas, keeping every connection, its style (dashed, thick, two-headed, headless), click links, and any subgraph or composite-state blocks, which come in as frames drawn around their nodes. Other Mermaid diagram types (sequence, gantt, pie and so on) aren't supported.
Markdown turns a Markdown outline into a themed tree diagram, the same conversion as Markdown Import, so you can draft structure in text and bring it onto the canvas.
Excalidraw reads a .excalidraw scene (what excalidraw.com's Save to disk produces) and keeps its shapes, labels, arrow connections, freehand drawings, sticky notes, frames, and images. In Draw mode it comes in as pen marks; in any other mode as diagram elements. It also reads a PNG or SVG exported from Excalidraw with Embed scene switched on (a .excalidraw.png or .excalidraw.svg file), which carries the whole scene inside the picture. The hand-drawn look flattens to clean strokes, and groups come apart into separate items.
draw.io reads a diagram from draw.io (diagrams.net, the desktop app, or its Confluence and VS Code plugins): a .drawio or .xml file, compressed or not, or a PNG or SVG exported with Include a copy of my diagram ticked. See Importing from draw.io below.

The tab menu holds Import, beside Export and Clear.

Each format card opens the same panel: paste or write the content into the box and press Import, or press Import a file instead to pick one from disk. Either way the tab updates once it parses. All formats at the top of the panel takes you back to the cards.

In Illustrate mode the dialog offers JSON only, since the other formats are diagrams rather than pages, and opens straight at it.

On a Dashboard tab, Import takes a Dashboard's own JSON export only (Export › JSON on a Dashboard tab): it opens straight at JSON and replaces the dashboard's rows, slots and what they hold, one step to undo. Anything else (a file that isn't JSON, or a tab that isn't a Dashboard) is turned away with a message, and the dashboard is left as it was. A slot that showed one of the document's other tabs reads as deleted when the file comes from another document; clear it or fill it again.

Paste from Excalidraw

You don't need a file to bring a drawing across. In Excalidraw, select what you want and copy it (Ctrl+C, or Cmd+C on a Mac), then click into a livediagram tab and paste (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V). The drawing lands where your pointer is, or in the middle of the view, and stays selected so you can move or restyle it at once. One undo takes the whole paste back.

In Draw mode, strokes become pen strokes, text becomes text boxes that fit their words, and Excalidraw's black ink follows the board: dark on a light board, light on a dark one. Its blue, green, red and orange become the matching pen colours.
In any other mode, such as Diagram, the drawing comes in as diagram elements, just as importing the file would.
You can also drag a .excalidraw file, or a PNG or SVG exported from Excalidraw with Embed scene on, straight onto the canvas.

When something couldn't come across exactly (Excalidraw groups, for example), a small note at the bottom of the canvas lists what changed. Pasting adds to the tab; it never replaces what is already there.

Excalidraw files as new documents

To bring whole boards across without opening a document first, use the Explorer page: next to Help at the top right, Import from has an Excalidraw button (hover it to see its name), beside the ones for Microsoft Whiteboard and draw.io. Choose one or more .excalidraw files, or PNG or SVG images exported from Excalidraw with Embed scene on, or drop them onto the panel. Each file becomes its own document with one tab that opens in Draw mode, named after the file. A file Excalidraw named for you, such as Untitled-2026-04-12-1430, becomes "Excalidraw board, 12 Apr 2026", dated when you saved it. From inside a folder, the new documents go into that folder. When the import finishes, it lists the new documents so you can open them, and any file it couldn't read, with the reason.

Images in an imported file

When an imported file carries images, they come across with it. Each one is resized in your browser (to at most 2048 pixels on its longest side) and saved to your image gallery, so it counts towards the gallery's space like any image you add yourself. An image you already have is recognised and reused rather than stored twice.

While the images save, the panel counts them ("Importing images 3 of 12…"). When it finishes, the dialog tells you how many were imported, how many were already in your gallery, and how many were left as placeholders and why: the file didn't include the image, its format couldn't be read, it was too large, or your gallery is full. The rest of the file always imports. Double-click a placeholder to add its image later.

In an offline document, images are kept inside the document in this browser instead of your gallery, up to a limit for each import.

Importing from draw.io

To bring many draw.io files across at once, each as its own document, use Import from draw.io on the Explorer page.

A draw.io file can hold several pages. The first page replaces the active tab, and every further page becomes a new tab right after it, named after its page, so a three-page file arrives as three tabs. One undo takes the whole import back, new tabs included, and links between pages become links between the tabs.

What carries over:

Shapes keep their kind, size, position, colours, borders, rounded corners, rotation, opacity and shadow. Flowchart shapes (process, decision, terminator, document, database, data) map one to one; less common ones come in as the nearest livediagram shape.
Text keeps its formatting: bold, italic, underline, colours, links, headings and lists in rich labels, plus font size and alignment.
Connections follow the route draw.io itself draws: the same corners, curves and shared trunks, attached to the shapes (or other connections) they join at the nearest connection point, with their arrowheads, line style and labels where draw.io puts them.
Swimlanes become lanes, with an upright title down the side where draw.io writes it upright, UML classes and ER entities become records with one row per field, tables become tables, and draw.io layers become the tab's layers, hidden and locked ones included.
Cloud and network icons (AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, servers, users and more) become the matching livediagram icon where there is a clear match. A stencil with no match comes in as a labelled box, so nothing disappears.
Colours left at draw.io's default take on your tab's theme, like anything drawn in livediagram, and so do near-black text and near-white panels, which draw.io's own dark mode turns too. Other colours you picked in draw.io stay as they were.
Text keeps its room. livediagram's text is a little larger than draw.io's, so the whole page is scaled up to match, and every label fits its shape as it did in draw.io.

Pictures embedded in the diagram come across like any imported board's images: resized and saved to your gallery. Pictures linked from the web, or from draw.io's own icon library, are never fetched; they come in as placeholders.

When anything could not come across exactly, the dialog shows one summary before closing, the same one every import uses: how the images came across, then one line per kind of change with its count: shapes that came in as labelled boxes (with the stencil names), arrowheads livediagram draws differently, labels shortened to fit their shapes, hidden items left out, and so on.

Import replaces the tab

Importing replaces the active tab's contents with what comes in, it does not merge (a multi-page draw.io file also adds a tab for each further page). Because that is destructive, the dialog leads with an amber warning naming the tab about to be overwritten, so you can back out before committing. If you change your mind afterwards, undo (Cmd / Ctrl + Z) brings the previous canvas back. To keep the current canvas as it is, add a new tab first and import into that.

Import is greyed out while a tab is locked, since a locked tab is protected from edits, and the tab menu isn't offered on a view-only share link.

Because importing overwrites the tab, the Import to tab dialog leads with a warning naming the tab, above the format cards.

Want to combine boards instead of replacing one? Import into a fresh tab, then copy the elements you want across to your working tab.

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