Extracting pieces of text from multiple notes

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
1

I’m wondering how best to do this in Tinderbox. While working on my notes - say during a meeting - I often jot down ideas that come to my mind for further processing and reflection later. The $Text of example Note1 might look like this:

Meeting text paragraph 1
Meeting text paragraph 2
An image or illustration
IdeaX: New idea to improve the world
Some more meeting text
IdeaX: another brilliant idea to explore later
Yet some more meeting text

Similarly I could have ideas prefixed by IdeaX in Notes 2, 3 and 4. I can easily retrieve those notes that have ideas with the test $Text.contains(“IdeaX”).

However what I would like is a dashboard-like note with the text of all my ideas extracted from a group of notes. These should then collected in the $Text field of that dashboard (even better with a date and link to the original note). In this way I have an instant overview of ideas rather than scroll through the sometimes longish text of the original notes. For instance the $Text field of the dashboard should show something like

New idea to improve the world
another brilliant idea to explore later
some idea from Note 2
some idea from Note 3

as a minimum solution. Even better would be

date1: New idea to improve the world (URL link to Note 1)
date 1: another brilliant idea to explore later (URL link to Note 1)
date 2: some idea from Note 2 (URL link to Note 2)
date 3: some idea from Note 3 (URL link to Note 3)

to follow up with the original note and know when it was added.

I’m afraid that here I hit my limits in terms of TB. There is not easy way to extract paragraphs (with \n at the end) based on a condition.

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2

A simple solution is to get in the habit of putting each idea (i.e. each sentence/paragrph in your example note) into a discrete notes. Indeed, lots of small notes (i.e. short amount of $Text) is closer to Tinderbox’s original design intent. Once the ideas are discrete notes then Tinderbox’s toolbox comes into play.

Tinderbox will query for ‘notes with $Text containing the phrase XX’ but can’t then easily locate the containing paragraph and copy or cut said text into another note (action code can’t make new notes). However, if the ‘ideas’ are the $Name (and $Text if desired) of a note it’s easy to gather them and concatenate them as the text of a note as in your example #1.

Action code linking makes basic links and can’t make text links (as in your example #2). But with basic links in place you can use the Roadmap pop-up/dialog to navigate your links.

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