Note: If you'd like to enable AI Proofing, that is a separate app that you would need your workspace admin to enable.

The approvals feature in Hive is designed to help organize and manage project approvals efficiently. Users can access approvals from their Home Page or within specific action cards in projects.

You can add a file to be proofed by your team from within an action card. Click Add proof to add a new draft of the file you are working on.

You can also drag the file to the Approval app.

Note: You can attach video files to be proofed as well. See the full list of supported file types at the bottom of this article.
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Once you have uploaded a new proof, you can confirm if you'd like an AI review and which reference documents you want to access. Add any other additional instructions that you think would be helpful for your proof.

If you want to skip this step and just Upload as a regular proof, click "Upload Only."

After the document is uploaded, you can select the approver type (internal, external, team).

Within each round, you'll be able to add stages to further delineate reviewer feedback. Once the route is set up, click the Request approval button again to make the approval route live and to trigger a notification for the first approver(s).

Request Review from a Team: You can send a request to an entire team by adding the 'team' as an approver. Once requested, a notification will be sent to all members of the team.

Add External Approver: Choose Add external approver if you would like to request approval from someone who is not in Hive. Simply enter their email address, and they will receive a link from Hive to review the content in the proofing window.

Note: You must add a proof to use this feature.

Change status after approval: Choose change status after approval to automate your approvals workflow by moving the action card to the appropriate status once a decision has been made.

If an assignment has been routed to you for your approval, it will be shown separately from your standard actions at the top of the My actions view in the "My Approvals" section. Click the item to begin the approval process.
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You can proof a document by clicking the file from the action card for your assignment. Once in the proofing tool, you can add a variety of annotations, stamps, shapes, text, free-hand drawings, and more.

To add a basic annotation, click "Annotate" in the upper panel and leave your comment.

Add highlights, freehand lines, highlights and more by clicking on the various buttons under "Annotate." You can append a comment to the lines or highlights as well.

Additionally, you can add:

The stamp tool is in both the Annotate and Insert tabs.

The second line is filled in when someone places the stamp, with their name and the current date and time. You can't type free text on the second line: the Subtitle field from the previous viewer has been replaced by these options.

In PDF view, choose Select and drag from an empty area of the page to draw a selection box around annotations. You can also use Shift, Cmd, or Ctrl while clicking annotations to select several.

Select two or more saved annotations anywhere in the document, then choose Group in the bottom toolbar. You must be able to edit every selected annotation. Replies, annotations with replies, and open AI suggestions cannot be grouped. Select a group and choose Ungroup to separate its annotations.

A group can span pages. Its comment lists each location, and the previous and next arrows jump between them.

Drag a movable annotation in a group to move the group’s movable annotations together. Text-anchored marks, such as highlights, stay in place.

Style an annotation: select it and choose Style in the toolbar that appears next to it. Settings are grouped into Text, Stroke, Fill and Opacity. Set stroke or border width with the slider or type a value from 0 to 24 pt; a box border of 0 means no border. The Presets row at the top applies a saved look to the annotation in one click. Choose Save preset to save the annotation's look under a name.

Style a tool before drawing: when a tool is selected, a preset strip appears in the top toolbar. Click a preset to use it for the next annotation you draw, or More presets to see the rest. Your style is your own look for that tool: hover over it and click the small arrow to change it.

Each tool group (text, shapes, lines, pen, highlight and text markup) has its own presets. The viewer remembers your style for each tool group in this browser.

Select a shape and drag any of its eight handles (four corners and four sides). Each handle moves only its own edge.

With a shape, line, arrow, or measure tool selected, drag on the page to draw. A single click doesn't draw anything; it only clears the selection. On video proofs, a tap on a paused frame still places a default box.

A Replace text edit is one comment: the caret holds the replacement text, and the struck-out text is part of the same comment.

Open the Measure tab in the toolbar to use the Distance, Perimeter, Area, Rectangular area, Ellipse area, Arc and Count tools. To match real-world units, choose the scale button next to the tools (for example 1.0 in = 1.0 in) and set the measurement scale. Select a measurement to see its details.

Open More (⋯) > Customize > Personal preferences to turn Compact comments on or off. It is on by default: long comments show up to three lines, and replies stay folded until you open the thread. This preference applies only to you in this browser.

Hover over a comment or reply, then click the smile icon to choose an emoji, or the thumbs-up icon to add a thumbs up. To remove your reaction, click your highlighted reaction. Hover over a reaction to see who added it.

External reviewers can react whenever they can comment. Reactions don't send notifications. You can't react on a locked version or on live website (HTML) proofs.

The Comments and AI review tabs show open and total counts, for example Comments 150 / 200. Hover over a tab to see a progress card with the percent done and a count for each status.

On a phone, the comments panel starts closed and opens as a full-width overlay, and approval actions appear as compact icon buttons.

Choose the page sidebar icon at the top left of the viewer to open Navigation:

If you can edit the proof, drag thumbnails to reorder pages, or open a page's Page actions menu (⋮) to choose Move to top, Move to bottom, Rotate clockwise, Rotate counterclockwise or Delete.

Page edits stay a draft until you choose Save as new version. Hive then adds the edited PDF as a new version of the proof and keeps existing annotations on their pages. If you leave with unsaved edits, Hive asks you to save them as a new version, discard them, or cancel.

Video proofs have View, Annotate, Shapes and Insert tabs. Annotate includes Comment (N), Rectangle (R), Callout (C), Ink (F) and Eraser (E).

Annotation duration: Choose Duration in the toolbar to set how long new annotations stay on screen: Single frame, 2 s, or 5 s (the default). Hive remembers your choice in this browser. A single-frame annotation shows as a diamond on the comments track and reads as Frame at 0:12.4 on its comment card. Drag its end handle to stretch it into a range. Duration is not available on locked or read-only proofs.

Each video comment shows a thumbnail of the frame where it was left.

You can compare versions when proofing various iterations of the same document. Open More (⋯) in the top right and choose Compare. The two versions open side by side, and each side has its own version picker. You can add annotations in either version, including on video proofs. Pressing Esc clears your selection but never closes a version. Choose Close comparison (X) to return to the single view.

Copy between versions: select an annotation and press Cmd/Ctrl+C, hover over the other version, and press Cmd/Ctrl+V. Only the mark is pasted, not its comment text.

Copy annotations to left: copies annotations from the older version to the latest. Copy over all annotations is the default; you can also choose Copy over callouts or Copy over selected annotations. Hive confirms how many it copied, for example "Copied 4 annotations", or tells you why nothing was copied.

If a direct link opens an older proof version and a newer version is available to you, the viewer shows a notice with View latest. Choose it to open the latest version you can access.

Open More (⋯) to download or save a proof. For PDFs and documents, the options include:

For video proofs, choose Download comments for a PDF of comments or Download video for the video file.

When a proof has open AI suggestions, signed-in reviewers downloading with annotations or downloading video comments can choose which comments to include:

Choose Download to export. Downloading does not change comments or suggestions in Hive. The comment-source choice does not appear for Download selected annotation, which exports only your selected annotations.

To save every file you can see in a Proofing folder, open the action card’s Proofing folder, select its three-dot menu (⋯), and choose Download folder. Hive downloads a ZIP named after the folder, with the current visible version of each file. Viewers with read-only access can use this option too.

If the folder has no downloadable files, the menu shows a disabled No files to download item. For a single proof or an annotated PDF, use the proof viewer’s download options instead.

When you are ready to sign off, click "Approve" or "Request Changes" based on your feedback. If you want to approve directly from the action card, scroll to the proofing section and choose your approval type.

You can make a decision for the proof you have been routed for approval from the action card for your approval assignment:

Pro Tip: You can also mark your decision within the proof itself by selecting the green check mark for approve and the red button for require changes.

If you'd like to use our AI Proofing feature, you can start an AI review by selecting the star icon in the right hand corner, next to the comment box. Once you click "Generate AI review," the review will begin in the proof itself.

Once the AI proofing review is complete, the recommendations will populate in that right-hand bar. You can go through each recommendation and choose to promote it to an annotation, or clear it.

The circle icon on the top left of each annotation will guide you through the process of Resolving, Dismissing, or Promoting the recommendation to an annotation.

After you've started an approval round, you can click into the settings and:

Click Add proof and choose how to add it:

You can also mark off 'Add as internal version,' which ensures that the version you're uploading isn't accessible by external proofers.

When you add two or more links, enter a Folder name. Hive adds each link as a separate asset in one proof folder.

To add more to a folder, click Add asset in the folder and choose File upload or Link. One folder can mix documents, hyperlinks, live websites and page snapshots. A mixed folder shows a preview of its first asset that is not a hyperlink above the asset list.

Each asset keeps its own versions. To update one asset, open its row menu and choose Add new version, then add one file or one URL. When you upload several files to a folder, a file with the same name as an asset becomes a new version of that asset, and other files are added as new assets.

If you need to upload multiple files into one document, you can do that a few ways.

The following file types are supported in proofing:
​Documents
.pdf, .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx, .key (Keynote), .rtf, .odt, .ods, .odp, .txt, .csv

Images
.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .tif, .tiff, .jp2, .jpc, .emf, .svg

Videos
.mp4, .mov, .webm

Email
.eml, .msg

Other
.html, .xml, .zip