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.
You get text that looks like this:
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.
- 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. ↩