Hello everyone! Another tasty update for you. 🧁
We’ve focused this update on improving exporting and copy/pasting, with a few other little fixes sprinkled on top.
Let’s dive in to the update.
Export properly formatted text
Workflowy now plays nicely when exporting and pasting into other text editors like Google Docs or MS Word. Headers and paragraphs maintain their formatting, bullets adopt standard bullet list styling and spacing.
New: Long-form writing support. We’ve heard your feedback on exporting long-form text in Workflowy. While the new(ish) header and paragraph styles are handy, the exported text still behaves like a list when pasted into another app.
So, we’ve removed indenting and bullets for headers and paragraphs in exported text. Bullet lists stay nested as usual, and headers and paragraphs within a bullet list keep their format and indentation.
This highly contrived scenario shows it better than words ever could:
This text uses a combination of headers, paragraphs, and bullets.
Exporting the text will remove the indenting and bullets for headers and paragraphs. Bullet lists stay the same.
Please give it a try and let us know if it makes sense (or not).
Export in Markdown
If you, like our developers, believe in The Only True Format, we have good news for you too: there’s now a Markdown option, right there in the Export window. We apply the same formatting rules described above.
Since there are ~seven billion variations of The Only True Format, it might (will) not play nice with all Markdown editors. If you encounter any issues, let us know which editor you’re trying to copy to and provide a sample of Markdown you’re trying to copy.
An example of some formatted text in Workflowy
And the markdown output preserves the text styles and links.
Export usability improvements
While we were at it, we made several other improvements to copying and exporting:
- New: “Export” button in the multi-select menu (that appears when you select multiple bullets). Click it to export all selected items at once.
- New: “Export” keyboard shortcut for those who prefer keyboard. Press Shift+Alt+E (Mac: Shift+Command+E) to export all currently selected bullets.
- New: “Export” Slash command for those who prefer commands over shortcuts. Type “/export” to export the bullet you’re focused on.
- Fix: “Download” button in the Export window now actually downloads on Android and iOS too!
Other fixes & improvements
- New: Now you can reorder board columns with the standard shortcuts that reorder bullets Alt+Shift+Up|Down (Ctrl+Shift+Up|Down)
- Fix: No more weird characters like ' in the URL title when you share a link from a browser to Workflowy on Android.
Let us know what you think about the changes, this update, or anything you think we should know.
Until next time, keep on keeping on.