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Importing from word Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
How do I import a simple Single column) outline from word?
I've exported files from word in the obvious formats but .htm. .html and .doc are greyed out in the OO 'open' dialog.
.xml files are not greyed out, but I just get a message 'The document could not be read'

Surely this is possible?
 
To retain the outline structure, it needs to be formatted with leading tab spaces which Word doesn't save to. You would have to copy and paste the text over and manually re-indent it. Generally you would create your outline in OmniOutliner and then move to Word to write it all out if needed which is why there isn't as much focus on importing in OO3.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by DerekM View Post
Generally you would create your outline in OmniOutliner
Well, not if you had to spend part of your day working on Windows, you wouldn't :-)


Quote:
Originally Posted by DerekM View Post
You would have to copy and paste the text over and manually re-indent it.
A delightful pastime !

In order to avoid this kind of thing, I wrote a simple utility a few years ago.

(MS Word is, after all, very likely to be the most widely-used outliner there is, not least because it and its clones are rather more cross-platform than OmniOutliner).

If you:
  1. Open your outline in Word,
  2. run ReadTree
  3. choose File > Import > Active Word Outline from the ReadTree menu,

ReadTree will capture the word outline, and you can then choose:
  • File > Export > OmniOutliner 3,
  • or File > Save As (to .opml, also readable in OO3)

You are very welcome to try it.

--

PS - The simple capacity to import MS Word outlines in this way (without resorting to my utility) would be much appreciated in OO4.

The almost universal currency of MS Word outlines provides a route, for example, from the venerable Inspiration to Omnioutliner. (Despite its great antiquity, Inspiration still does a better job of diagramming outlines than OmniGraffle, which yields a slightly displeasing layout, with too many jagged lines, too much link space, too little text space, and a tendency to let right-angle links overlap in large outlines).

Rob

Last edited by RobTrew; 2009-07-06 at 11:44 PM..
 
Hey that's pretty neat. Would you mind if this was linked to on the extras page?
 
Thanks - you're very welcome to link to it.

I may not be able to maintain it very actively (not even sure that I still have a Realbasic compiler on my system).

How about including that kind of simple functionality in OO4 ?

Rob
 
Oh believe me, importing Word and other common formats is well on the requested features list. We can not give a definitive answer either way right now :)
 
Thanks for that - it does exactly what I want.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DerekM View Post
Oh believe me, importing Word and other common formats is well on the requested features list. We can not give a definitive answer either way right now :)
People have been asking for simple word import functionality from OO for years now - I won't be holding my breath :-)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobTrew View Post
Well, not if you had to spend part of your day working on Windows, you wouldn't :-)


If you:
  1. Open your outline in Word,
  2. run ReadTree
  3. choose File > Import > Active Word Outline from the ReadTree menu,

ReadTree will capture the word outline, and you can then choose:
  • File > Export > OmniOutliner 3,
  • or File > Save As (to .opml, also readable in OO3)

You are very welcome to try it.

Rob
Thanks, Rob, but I'm running into a problem.

I followed the instructions and when I try to import the Active Word Outline, I get the following error message - "This program needs to be run from the \Office folder of the Microsoft Office installation"

I click OK and the next error message is - "No outline present in Word"

The ReadTree program is in the same folder as MS Word. I have restarted both programs and get the same error.

I'm running MS Office 2008 ver 12.1.5 in Mac OS 10.5.8

What am I doing wrong?

thanks in advance,
Billy
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacDeluxe View Post
I'm running MS Office 2008 ver 12.1.5 in Mac OS 10.5.8
Oddly enough, I am now getting the same. Something seems to have broken it since July.

My first guess was Office, but you are running 12.1.5 (I am running 12.2.1)

10.5.8 perhaps ?

I will investigate when I get a moment.

In the meanwhile, does anybody have a system on which this is still working ? If so, what OS X and Office versions are you running ?

--

Last edited by RobTrew; 2009-08-09 at 10:32 PM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobTrew View Post
Oddly enough, I am now getting the same. Something seems to have broken it since July.

My first guess was Office, but you are running 12.1.5 (I am running 12.2.1)

10.5.8 perhaps ?

I will investigate when I get a moment.

In the meanwhile, does anybody have a system on which this is still working ? If so, what OS X and Office versions are you running ?

--
FWIW, I have another machine here running 10.5.6 and office 12.0.0 that reports the same error with the same file.

?

thanks,
Billy
 
 


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