Paste Multi-Level Bulleted Lists into WorkFlowy

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May 9, 2012

Here at WorkFlowy HQ we’ve been thinking about how to better enable people to move their lists from elsewhere into WorkFlowy. It’s been possible to paste single-level lists into WorkFlowy for a long time – but what fun is that?? The power of WorkFlowy lies in its hierarchical structure!

The problem with importing multi-level lists is that there are so many different formats – HTML, OPML, plain text, etc., etc., and many formats come in many variations. We also want pasting lists into WorkFlowy to feel seemless – just copy the list from one program and paste it directly into WorkFlowy. No having to click on menus to bring up a separate box to paste into or anything like that.

We decided to start with enabling pasting of normal bulleted lists* like those you’d find in Google Docs. 

Here’s an example. I have a (very interesting) list in Google Docs that I want to move into WorkFlowy. First I select the list in Google Docs and hit ctrl-c (or Command-C on Mac) to copy it.

Then I open up WorkFlowy, navigate to where I want to paste the list, click into the item in which to paste and press ctrl-v (Command-v on Mac) to paste. This is the result.

Fancy, huh? We hope this helps you move your other lists into WorkFlowy. More import options will come in the future.

* For the more tech-savvy, we specifically support pasting HTML lists that use <ul>, <ol>, and <li> tags. Note that some programs like Microsoft Word and very old versions of Google Docs do not save HTML lists in a sane format, so we currently can’t import them correctly.

Update: You can now paste and export OPML as well. It works better than the other options, so try it!

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Brigette Brinton
9 years ago

This is still less than useful. It isn’t possible to paste bulleted/numbered lists from Word into a GoogleDoc, and then into WorkFlowy.

hazymatMat
9 years ago

Agree. I just came to this (almost 2 year old) page to find that my bullet-point lists in Word / Onenote won’t import.

Shame, it’s the only problem / lack of functionality that I have found so far…

Jacob
Jacob
8 years ago
Reply to  hazymatMat

Just paste your notes into Google docs and then into workflow.

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