Module 9 · Level 3 · 15 min
Publish a map to a public link
A published map becomes a web address you can send to anyone — a client, a team, a group chat. They open it read-only, with no account and no install. This is the fastest way to make someone else see what you have been building.
Publishing it
- Click 🌐 Publish in the toolbar. Its own description is the shortest summary
of this whole module: “publish this map to a tabtree.app link — readable on a phone, no
account and no install for whoever opens it”. The same thing lives in the Files
menu, under Export, import, publish.
- Leave the passphrase empty for a public map — we cover protected pages in the next module — and publish.
- You get an address of the form
tabtree.app/m/<id>, with share buttons right there: WhatsApp, email, LinkedIn, X, and your device's own share sheet.
That is it. What the recipient sees is the real reader — they can pan, zoom, open branches and read notes. They cannot change your map.
Two things to know before you share it
The link carries the view you are in
Publish from the kanban and your reader lands on the kanban; publish from the mind map and they land on the mind map. Decide what you want them to see before you click, and switch view first. It is the difference between “here is my thinking” and “here is what is left to do”.
Publishing again keeps the same address
Fix a typo, add a branch, publish again — the link does not change. So you can send it early and keep improving the map afterwards, which is the opposite of how most document sharing works.
The 90-day clock
This matters most where it is least visible: a link inside a proposal, a signature, a
PDF you sent to a prospect. If a published map is doing long-term work for you, open it and
publish again every couple of months — or, better, send the map as
one .html file instead, which never expires because it does not live on
anyone's server.
Nothing is lost when a page expires: the map is still yours, in your library and in your folder. Only the public address stops answering.
What your licence allows
Published pages are counted against your licence key, and the allowance depends on your edition:
| Edition | Published pages |
|---|---|
| Starter | 10 |
| Creator | 50 |
| Studio | 200 |
Unpublishing frees a slot, and so does letting a page expire. A single published map is capped at 2 MB and 5 000 nodes — generous for a map, tight if you have pasted in a lot of images, which is the usual cause when a publish is refused.
How it looks when you paste it
A published map carries a preview image, so the link expands into a thumbnail in WhatsApp, LinkedIn and most chat apps rather than showing as a bare URL. That preview is generated from the map itself — which is another reason to publish from the view you actually want people to see.
Your turn
Take the map you are proudest of, switch to the view that shows it best, publish it, and paste the link where your people are — your team channel, your group, your next email.
This is the exercise for the whole course, not just this module: a map nobody opened taught you a tool, a map someone replied to taught you what to put in the next one.