Annotations
Here, annotations means any type of event-based data. Events can represent stages (N1, N2, R, W), respiratory events, or user-defined marks.
Annotation classes
The Annotations dock lets you toggle event types and view time-stamped instances in the main viewing window.

As for the Signals dock:
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you can toggle between selecting all or none by clicking the top button (Select all/none)
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you can filter rows by typing a comma-delimited list of annotations
When selecting an annotation class, all its instances are added to the Instances dock table, described below.
Instances
For selected annotation classes, this lists all instances, sorted by clock-time. As well as clock-time, the table shows the event onset in seconds past the EDF start time, and the duration of the event (also in seconds).

If you select an event by clicking on it, the main viewer will move to that position in the recording: this provides an easy way to navigate through the recording, e.g. to view detected spindles, if a spindle annotation has been added.
You can also filter which instances are displayed in this table (based on annotation class) by typing a comma-delimited list of terms, as in the example above that retricts displayed rows to wake (W) and artifact events.