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Getting TextExpander and WorkFlowy to play nicely

July 24, 2020 Geek Alert, Meta, Software

We use WorkFlowy to outline Scriptnotes before we record. After 462 episodes, I finally decided to make a template for it so that I wasn’t typing it all from scratch every time. So I made a skeleton outline, which you can see here.

Excited for the all time I was going to save, I copy-pasted the outline into TextExpander, the app I use for such things.1 I assigned it an abbreviation and tried it in WorkFlowy.

It failed.

It pasted plain text, with none of the indentation and formatting I wanted.

Naturally, I tried to Google a solution, but nothing turned up. So I experimented with different options. It turns out the trick is to Export the template (using the three-dot menu on the left) and choose OMPL as the format.

workflowy export

You get text that looks like this:

workflowy opml

A mess, right? But it works.

Copy-paste it into TextExpander. When expanded into WorkFlowy, it’ll be properly indented and formatted.

For the record, the amount of time I spent figuring out and blogging this time-saving technique is now probably a wash.

  1. TextExpander is fine, but I suspect there are other macro apps that work just as well or better. This technique should work with any of them. ↩

Related Posts

  1. PDF to FDX
  2. How to convert a PDF to Final Draft
  3. Find and Replace, a screenwriter’s best friends

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