[JeffreyCox]

Has anyone come up with a good Microsoft Word export. With all due respect to the WONDERFUL people at Natara, who make a great product that has been my "right hand man" for years, the RTF-MS WORD export isn't very good / useful.

Thanks in advance to anyone's input.

Best,

[JeffreyCox]

Let me throw this out there...........

I'm in NEED of this and would be willing to pay someone for a good Microsoft Word Export Template if they could whip one out quickly. Budget being around, oh, $100 -$175?????

I'm not looking for something complicated; just something that will create a MS Word document that looks similar to the Bonsai print and hitting these points:

> Levels indented correctly.
- Font the same for Outline items.
> Notes showing in different font (like courier)
- Indented under item (branch) note belongs to.
> Notes icon not necesary.

I'm attaching an example.

Please leave me an email at "jeffrey [at] fixyourtodolist [dot] c0m" if you can do it. Please mark your message as High Priority so I'll see it.

Thanks!

[bnystrom]

Jeff also wanted me to post my very rough "WordML" Bonsai export template. I think that other than HTML, this would be the way to go for producing Bonsai->Word outlines. You'll need to search on MSDN or other places for the new XML formats supported by Office 2003 and 2007. This is just a "to get you started". I never really finished this up and don't really have much time to at the moment.

I've uploaded the .oxt file HERE

(Sorry, I would have posted the template code directly, but it ends up with a lot of smiley faces)

[Alec]

Hi,

Perhaps there are a number of us who would be willing to pay something for this kind of a template.

I'd be willing to pay up to $30.00.

Alec

[JeffreyCox]

No takers? Common "Weekend Code Warriors," were are you!!?? ;-)

Oy! I just spent two hours messing with my old HTML OXT I created years ago. It's close, but when you bring it into Microsoft Word.... well...... wow, it's just not there.

I really need this!

I looked some into the WordML information; that looks really cool and probably the way to go. But, my coding days and brain power are just not there enough to try to tackle this.

I'm thinking of posting this to RentACoder and see if I can get a taker there, but, I thought I'd tickle this one more time here.

Thanks,

[reesd]

I played a little with WordML on the plane. It meets my needs and I don't really have time to make more changes, but hopefully it sends you the right direction.

I am using header 1-9 for each level of the branch, that make it look right in outline mode. To change how things look edit the resulting document's styles in Word normally. After you save the updated document, copy the <styles> section from your new document into the OXT. I tried using an external Word template to do this, but I couldn't figure how to get Word to use the Word template's styles.

I also through a tab and a date in there to show how you could have additional columns.

I couldn't figure out how to attach files so I just attached it as code inline. When trying to upload I received a very helpful "Error Uploading File" dialog when I click on Upload File. If someone can tell me how to upload I will upload it as well.

d

[slwenglish]

That's really good stuff, David. The Word document looked good when I tried it.

I can't follow all the details in the template, but I did spot one typo:

Quote

---

[NOTE]
<wi/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif>
<wi/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gifPr>
<wi/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gifStyle w:val="Normal"/>
</wi/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gifPr>
<w:r>
<w:t>#TEXT#</w:t>
</w:r>
</wi/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif>

[ITEM_END]

---

- In the note, you should have used the variable #NOTE#, rather than #TEXT#

I've been playing with an rtf export format which BruceGDC posted in 2005. jhundleyj also posted something with a question which never got answered. bkelety and severe also made contributions in the distant past. (If any of you guys are still reading the forums, I'll have a go at posting my contribution in the not too distant future.)

The only problem I've had with RTF and XML format is the way both of these mess up if you use non-ANSI standard characters in your notes. For example the é in my name tends to cause loss of the preceding word. It would take a lot of editing to define substitutions for every possible non-ANSI character. I don't suppose anyone's already done that, have they?

Stéph

[slwenglish]

Well, will you look at that now.... Ironically, the symbol codes in this forum have messed up my quote from David's template. Now, there's a good illustration of the sort of limitation which the XML and RTF exports have!

Stéph
i/expressions/face-icon-small-confused.gif

[reesd]

Quote

---

Originally posted by: slwenglish
Well, will you look at that now.... Ironically, the symbol codes in this forum have messed up my quote from David's template. Now, there's a good illustration of the sort of limitation which the XML and RTF exports have!

---

It took me a bit to figure out also, you need to click on "attach code" and then add it in a second step.

Thanks for the fix.

d

[slwenglish]

There... hopefully that will work - an extract from your code with the #TEXT# replaced with #NOTE#
Thanks for explaining how to upload the code without it changing to emoticons.

Stéph

[LKent]

Thanks, everyone, as this MS Word Export template has great potential!

One problem I'm having: when I apply Stéph's change to the note section, it works great on my small outlines, but all my larger outlines encounter the error below when I try to open the exported file in Word. The original template posted by reesd (i.e, before applying Stéph's change) works fine on all my outlines. Any guesses as to the problem? Do I have characters only in my notes section that are not compatible with XML? Or, could it be that my outlines are too large when including the notes?

HERE'S THE ERROR MESSAGE (the line # varies depending on which outline I'm trying to export, but the rest remains the same):

Current error message:
The XML File XXXX cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.

Click on "Details":
Illegal XML character
Error Location: Line: 442 , Column: 3

[slwenglish]

Ah yes, you've run into the inherent problem with XML and RTF (both of these formats have a limited character set and reserve certain characters for control codes).

So, if you open the export file in a text editor (preferrably one of those free text editors for programmers, which display which column and row your cursor is in), you'll find the offending character in line 442, column 3. Since it didn't happen before you applied my edit, the problem character will be in one of your notes.

The Bonsai export function doesn't give us the option to substitute the problem characters, so you've got a couple of options:

1) don't export notes (ie delete the section in the template from [NOTE] to just before [ITEM_END]), or
2) avoid putting control characters in your outline (example: I would have to spell my name without the é for it to work in an RTF export).

Alternative: Go for a plain text export. I've got a text export template and a Word template which runs a macro to convert the text into a .doc with styles applied to set heading levels, but I need to spend half an hour tidying it up before I could make it available for anyone else...

Stéph

[LKent]

Thanks, Stéph, for telling me how to resolve it! You are exactly right. After downloading a better text editor, I've found that I can find and eliminate the "special" characters.

[JeffreyCox]

Hi All!

First; thanks for eveyone's response and time! Much appreciated!

My apolgoies for my delay; things have been busy ---- thank goodness for Bonsai!!!!!!

The Word export is looking promising. One question, if anyone knows; when I export notes, the CR / LF (linebreaks) in my notes don't show up in the export ......... the note runs together as one line. Any ideas? Any fixes to this?

Thanks again, All.