Glad I could help. 

A bit of trivia. MLO mostly calls the text that you see in the Outline and 
To-Do on the Main pane the Task *title*. As you found, it is called the 
*caption 
*in the Setup Advance filtering dialog. The other place I found it used is 
in the filtering option when you do a search.

On Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 1:24:30 AM UTC-5, Eudaimon Dandaran wrote:
>
> 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
>>>
>>

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