Importing Word Outlines

[hwaynej]

Is there anyway to maintain the outline structure of a word document when importing to OO? I have a ton of notes structured as Word outlines and would like to maintain the structure on import to OO. Copy/paste doesn't do it. Importing using OO import Word doesn't do it either.

One of the big benefits of OO is the ability to export outline structure (and styles) to Word outline. It would be great to have a round trip ability - From Word Outline to OO to Word Outline again.

Any thoughts?

[ediamond]

Agreed. Round tripping would take this application to the next level and let me ditch Word for all my outlining tasks. It's those pesky corporate PC types....;)

How bout it, OmniGuys? Can you show us the love?

[danield1]

Went to the trouble of registering for this forum just to add my voice to that of ediamond... I am stuck working in WORD so my client and I can edit documents; round trip import / export for (at least) basic outline documents would be very helpful -- even if I can't import every obscure WORD document feature and style, just the outline structure and text / pasted images would be a big help.

[JKT]

I have no idea where this thread went, but someone asked about copy/pasting outlines from Word into OmniOutliner not too long ago and OmniGroup answered. It can be done - just ensure you don't have anything selected prior to the paste (otherwise the Word outline will be pasted as text within a child). The only thing I don't remember is how to get rid of the focus ring once you have clicked the ooutline - Esc doesn't do it... FWIW, OmniOutliner already exports as rtf or other Word compatible formats.

The logical extension would be to allow import of Word formats too. Going back, however, has one major problem - at least as far as I can tell - it isn't possible to have additional columns in the Outline feature of Word.

[hwaynej]

Perhaps you're referring to this post http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=151 which is actually talking about something a bit different.

I am not merely looking for a way to past top level items (as, for example in a list) from Word into OO. For example,

Item One
Item Two
Item Three

but to import the hierarchy of a multilevel Word outline in tact.

Item One
-Subpoint
-Subpoint
--Subpoint
--Subpoint
Item Two

As far as I know, this cannot be done with import or copy/paste.

[JKT]

That was the one - the impression I got from James's response was that it would preserve the hierarchy from a Word outline when pasted, but if it doesn't...

[jjcrump]

Allow me to revive this thread. I've got a whole bunch of lecture notes composed as Word outlines. On my iBook g4 (OS X 10.4.10) I've only got the antiquated Word:mac v.X. I need some convenient way to get these outlines into OO while retaining their hierarchy. Any new clues since 2006?

The work-around I've used:


save .doc as .htm from w/in Word
strip everything but <hx> tags with text editor
search & replace heading tags w/appropriate number of tabs
copy and paste into OO


I suppose I could automate this with a little shell or python script or something, but surely there's a better way!