I have 150+ duplicated tasks in my MLO Inbox and more in the rest of my outline. How this happened is not entirely clear to me and is a long story, but it involves migrating to a new hard drive while retaining the old one as an external drive, synchronization issues with OneDrive, and exporting and importing an MLO file. Not to mention two or three months of neglecting the processing and organizing phases of GTD while continuing to execute the capture part of it.
In the first place, I tried to figure out how to sort the tasks in Inbox view by task name but failed. I'd be happy enough spending the five or so minutes it would take to just pick through the list and delete the duplicates manually if anyone knows how this can be done. Given that I could not figure out how to sort tasks by name, I turned to my old friend, Excel. I consider myself a proficient Excel user but MLO exports data in XML file format and I don't know anything about XML. That said, I tried exporting the contents of my inbox to an Excel XML file and then opening that file in Excel, sorting by task name and then by creation date, and then using the remove duplicate function in Excel. These steps leave behind the tasks with their original creation dates. When I hit save, Excel warned that I would lose some formatting if I saved the file in XML format and asked me to confirm this is what I wanted to do. I hit yes and closed the document. When I tried importing the file in MLO, it said something about an invalid file format. I exported the inbox anew and this time, only sorted the file and tried saving it. Got the formatting warning again and saved anyway. Tried importing the new file into MLO, got the same error message. Next iteration: exported the inbox, removed duplicates without sorting, tried saving: same results. Third iteration: tried saving as an .xlsx file but couldn't import this into MLO. Fourth iteration: tried saving as an MLO XML file and opening this in Excel- couldn't. Not sure what else to do now besides either getting up to speed on using XML in Excel or removing the duplicates manually. Any suggestions, whether in terms of using Excel, MLO's functions by themselves, some other option I haven't heard of...? I'm a little afraid to hear that the solution is far simpler than what I tried doing but would appreciate any help that can be offered, humiliating or otherwise. :) Thank you, Eudaimon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/3e0ce7d0-08e0-48a9-b270-e3b1592c8e1d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
