Thank you Zel! That did work for me. After grouping by Creation Date and sorting by Caption (didn't know it was called caption- oops!), I was able to identify the date on which all the duplicates were created. Well, almost all of them. I must have done something else that complicated things further because there were some other duplicates on other dates, though thankfully not very many. And just to be on the safe side, I saved one set of tasks in a folder called "Duplicated Tasks" and hid them from the to do list while retaining and organizing the other set. Thanks so much! -Ed
On Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at 1:45:25 AM UTC-4, [email protected] wrote: > > Have you tried creating a new view (sort task by name, e.g.) and then: > > Filter > Group & Sort > Sort tasks by > caption > > > 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/4234ea26-2da0-4531-8182-c0358d4f5013%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
