Guide

Community resources: Importing from Roam

A collection of tips and tricks for importing from Roam to Tana Outliner

Here are some tips gathered from actual Roam users who made the transition to Tana Outliner and made guides to help others follow their footsteps:

  1. Ness Labs wrote a comprehensive article for anyone considering making the switch from Roam to Tana Outliner, and offers basic instructions as well.
  2. Lukas aka CortexFutura made a video clearly explaining the process of migrating from Roam to Tana Outliner, addressing the few differences and incompatibilities to take into consideration.
  3. Roam graphs are highly customized to the individual's work and may not map 1:1 with Tana Outliner, so community member Shashank outlined tips on how to do some very helpful preprocessing of your Roam graph before exporting.
  4. The original video by Tana team member Stian Haklev that demonstrated importing Roam graphs to Tana Outliner

Preprocessing by Shashank

Depending on whether you used attributes/tags/pages/nested pages, I can think of the following formats [[page]] , #page , #[[page]] , [[[[page]] [[page1]]]] , #[[[[page]] [[page1]]]] , page:: (are there more?!)

All of these are perfectly handled by Tana Outliner. eg: #page and #[[page]] will be converted to an alias #page which points to the node page. In Tana Outliner you can remove this alias to turn #page into page by taking the cursor into #page, pressing Ctrl+K, typing "Remove alias for reference". However, I don't know if this can be done in bulk.

Solution: do this in bulk within Roam using Fabrice Gallet's Find and Replace extension in Roam Depot. In this extension's settings there's a simple "Allow 'Whole Graph' Find and Replace" toggle, switch it on.

Now, go back to your graph, press Ctrl+P, type "Find &.." you'll see the "Find and Replace in Whole graph option".

Choose that, click, you'll see a blue pop-up. Now do your thing. turn #[[page]], #page into [[page]].

This was a simple example. There's regex support too.

Community resources: Importing from Roam - Tana Outliner Learn