Hello,
As a power user of ChatGPT, I’ve been actively working with the Canvas feature for structured thinking and document building. While the concept is promising, I’ve encountered several major limitations that significantly hinder its usability and flow.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of the issues and some suggestions for improvement:
Major Pain Points
- No Document List or Index View
There’s no intuitive way to view a list of existing Canvas documents.
Retrieving past documents requires manually scrolling through previous conversations, which is inefficient and frustrating. - Editing Is Severely Limited
All edits must be done through pattern-based (regex) commands, making even simple revisions unnecessarily complex.
It lacks a basic WYSIWYG or direct-edit mode for intuitive use. - No Support for Consolidated Document Creation
There’s no feature to merge or bundle multiple Q&A or conversation threads into a single, coherent document.
Users are forced to manually copy-paste across windows. - Formatting Breaks When Copying Out
When copying content from Canvas into external editors like Notion or Word, all formatting (lists, code blocks, bold text, etc.) gets disrupted or lost.
This breaks the structure of the content and ruins its readability.
Suggestions for Improvement
- Add a document list or searchable index view for quick access to previous work
- Provide a direct editing interface that doesn’t require regex or pattern commands
- Enable bulk export or merge of conversation blocks into one document
- Support Markdown or clean HTML copying to preserve formatting when exporting
These limitations are not just about convenience — they are core blockers for users who rely on ChatGPT for knowledge structuring and professional-level workflow.
I believe that addressing these would significantly increase the productivity and creative potential of the platform.
Thank you for your consideration.