If the duplications occured all at once, maybe Group by... > Created date
On Monday, October 15, 2018 at 5:40:52 AM UTC-5, Eudaimon Dandaran wrote: > > 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/9570bdf5-546f-4133-8c4c-51f92b82eb7c%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
