Bring in files
Notes, documents, slides, and exports, up to twenty at a time.
Files are good for writing you did yourself: journals, notes, memos, drafts, reviews. Cranes reads them for how you think, not just for what they say.
Steps
- Open Bring history (the second step of setup, or the account menu later).
- Choose Files.
- Drop your files onto the page, or click to choose them.
- Remove anything you added by mistake, then choose Bring it in.
What you can bring
PDF, Word (.docx), slides (.pptx), spreadsheets (.xlsx), and text files: .txt, .md, .csv, .json, .xml, .yaml.
| Limit | Amount |
|---|---|
| Files at once | 20 |
| Total size | 25 MB for all the files together |
| Total text | 400,000 characters across all of them |
If you hit a limit, bring the files in smaller batches.
If a file is refused
- “…is empty”: the file has nothing in it.
- “…does not contain readable content”: Cranes couldn’t read any text from it. Scanned PDFs are the usual cause, since they’re pictures of pages rather than text. Export a text version and try again.
- “…is not a supported document”: the file type isn’t on the list above, or the file has no text. Save it as a PDF or text file.
- “Those files are too large together” or “…contain too much text for setup”: choose fewer files at a time.
Each file becomes its own entry
Every file becomes one entry, and long ones are split at paragraph breaks so a chapter can point to the right passage. You’ll find them on your Entries page, where you can change how each one is used. See Control how an entry is used.