Dear Thortspace … how do Import and Export work in Thortspace?

How about importing? What if I have an existing relational database in say LibreOffice Base or Matlab, or some gigantic multi-lingual application source code I’d like to map using Thortspace to render? Or even something monolingual yet horrific like the C++ Boost library would be well explored with Thortspace. There are a LOT of horrible yet frustratingly promising code libraries out there that could use a good 3D render/mapping. Is there an underlying format or protocol such as freemind or an xml schema I can Python scan/parse/translate source code or other big relational data into that Thortspace would read? Come to think of it I haven’t seen any batch/automation-style import options. Are there plans?

1. Import

We do have plans to provide an API that will support import and linking to other data sources, however this probably won’t be until 2021.

In the meantime you can get quite a lot of importing done by drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste…

You can drag-and-drop pictures, URLs and multiple lines of text (each of which will go into a separate thort). There’s an article about that here:

(14) How to … take advantage of Drag-and-Drop into thortspace

And similarly you can copy-and-paste text-lines into thortspace and copy thorts out of thortspace and paste them into spreadsheets, notepads, or word-processing applications.

There’s an article about using copy-and-paste inside thortspace here:

(15) How to … take advantage of Copy and Paste in thortspace

The process of using copy-and-paste to transfer data in and out of thortspace is very similar to this. One user told me that he had imported 10,000 thorts by this means.

2. Export

You can export a group of thorts or several groups using copy and paste.

(1) Select the group or groups you want to export and chose “Copy Thorts” from the edit menu (or Control-C / Command-C on desktop operating systems).

(2) Go to the target application and choose paste (of Control-V / Command-V on desktop operating systems).

Another option for export is the “List All Thorts in Browser” menu item on the sphere menu.

Which produces output as shown below (each group title is put into bold and then all the thorts within that group and listed). Thorts that have URLs are created with the same URL as in the thort.

I have written an article about using “List All Thorts in Browser” in combination with the use of Arrangements which makes it convenient to output and print a set of alternative ToDo lists from a single Thortspace sphere… see the following article:

Dear thortspace … Can Thortspace ToDo lists be printed?

Andrew is a Product Designer at Thortspace, the world’s first collaborative 3D mind mapping software. Thortspace enables breakthrough collaborative thinking wherever and whenever it is most needed. More stories here.