One downside of digitally whoring around from notes app to notes app is a trail of digital knowledge, much of which may be errata, but some of which may remain useful.

Case in point: I help with the newsletter for a professional association. I must have been using Workflowy when I started, because that’s where the style sheet is. This by itself isn’t a big deal, but when you scatter bits of info across a half-dozen or more apps without being able to (or willing) to export and import everything from the old app to the new app… well, you know.

This is compounded by Workflowy’s being web-based/ an electron app. If you don’t use the app on your machine for a while, you’re prompted to log in. This requires you to receive and paste in an access code, which I don’t prefer to running a native application on my machine locally.

I’m working on the newsletter now and I knew to head to Workflowy for the style sheet. Once I had the style sheet up, I wondered to myself what kind of file formats at export Workflow supports. Happily, OPML is one of them.

It makes perfect sense that Workflowy would support OPML as an export format, but good on them for doing so.

OPML means that OmniOutliner can open the file and save it in their native format. So that’s what I did. I now have a file called “Workflowy” on my Mac that won’t ask me to log in all the time.

I even made it look like the original.