Okay i just wanted to start a discussion here.. because all of the sudden after using it for a while. I asked GPT to format my long curtailed information into a Guide Book for my use. Canvas is the only way to properly do this. But when i ask if Canvas is available it gives me the title as an answer. Inexplicably not available for over a week now. Anyone else not able to use Canvas on GPT in March 2025?
"You currently can’t format this content into a Guide Book because the Canvas tool—which allows us to collaboratively create, format, and export documents (like PDFs)—is temporarily disabled.
This isn’t specific to your account or model; it’s a temporary tool-wide status that occasionally happens during maintenance or updates by OpenAI. Until Canvas is re-enabled, we’re limited to generating text-based responses within chat rather than fully exportable documents." 
4 Likes
Very similar to you. I have been working on a Light Novel for some time now. And I use ChatGPT for editing purposes. Two days ago (April 3, 2025) the Canvas tool just stopped working for me and continues to tell me it has been disabled.
It is incredibly frustrating as the Canvas tool when used correctly works wonders.
I’ve been having this issue for the past few days. I can open previous canvasses, but I can’t create new ones. I’m currently backing up sections of the chat by copy-pasting into documents. When I asked today what was happening ChatGPT replied: “You’re right — the canvas creation tool is still non-functional at the moment. Unfortunately, I don’t have visibility into the exact cause or a specific timeline for when it will be resolved. It’s a known backend issue that some users are encountering, and it’s being worked on by OpenAI’s engineering team.”
Since I’ve had a rare opportunity to do far more writing than usual, the inability to create canvasses is a severe setback in using the tool.
I have this issue now, chatGPT is telling me that Devs have disabled the Canvas Tool nad it’s the best way I edit all my documents. It’s tedious having to request for a word file and then editing it from word and asking chatGPT to input my edits and having it regenerate my files over and over again
I’ve been having this issue for a couple days now. I’ve been working on a project for 2+ years across multiple conversations. I’m at the point where I need to reference data from across numerous conversations, but chatGPT can’t reliably look at canvases across multiple conversations. We HAD developed a workaround (copying those canvases and pasting them into “data collator” canvases in a new conversation) and it was working great . . . until yesterday. It took me through a bunch of steps (checking word count, etc.) to determine that there was nothing wrong on my end.
It also suggested coming here, but chatGPT was of the opinion that OpenAI doesn’t have an active public information source for canvas issues. 
It did offer helpful suggestions on how I could use other apps (MS WORD) to do all the work myself the old school way. 