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!