Will my original dates be preserved?

No, and we would rather say so up front. Every imported note is dated the day you import it. When Notivo finds a full date in your text (day, month and year) it puts that date in the note’s title, so you can still read and search it, but it does not rewrite your timeline with it. Reconstructing a past timeline from prose means guessing, and a wrong date looks exactly like a right one and is never found again. If your notes matter enough to import, they matter enough not to be quietly mis-dated.

What can I import from?

Anything you can copy. Select all in Word, Google Docs, Apple Notes, Notion, Obsidian, Evernote or a plain text file, copy, and paste it into Settings → Import. You can also drop .md and .txt files directly — Google Docs exports Markdown in one click (File → Download → “Markdown (.md)”), and an Obsidian vault is already .md files on disk. There is no connector to sign in to and no export archive to wait for, which is deliberate: the paste path works on every tool, every plan and every operating system, including the ones that have no export at all.

What happens if I import the same thing twice?

Nothing duplicates. Each note gets an identifier derived from its own text, so importing the same material again recognises what is already there and writes only what is missing. That is also why you can close the tab mid-import and simply run it again — it picks up where it stopped.

Does an AI read my imported notes?

No. The import is entirely rule-based: no model sees your document, and nothing about it is summarised, scored or interpreted. Anything marked with @bb or #bb, Notivo’s Black Box sigils, stops the import completely rather than being partially brought in — Black Box notes are created only inside the app, so they never travel through an import at all.

Import

You already keep these notes. Bring them with you.

If you have a Word file, a Google Doc, an Apple Note or a Notion page where you jot what happened with your team, you don’t have to start from an empty screen. Copy it, paste it into Notivo, and see exactly what it would create before a single note is written.

Bring your notes in See how Notivo works

Settings → Import. Paste, or drop a .md / .txt file.

Why this exists

An empty tool is a tool you forget.

The managers who need Notivo most are the ones already doing the work by hand: a running doc per person, a long note per quarter, a folder of one-offs. That material is the whole point — and asking someone to retype two years of it is the same as asking them not to bother.

So the question isn’t “can Notivo read a file.” It’s whether you can hand it a wall of text and trust what comes out the other side. That trust is the entire design of this feature.

## 15 March 2024 — 1:1 with Maya
Asked for more scope. Agreed she takes onboarding.
- follow up Friday

## 2 April 2024 — Marcus
Delivered the SLA doc. Needs one more sprint.

Paste something shaped like this and Notivo splits it into two notes, keeps every word exactly as you wrote it, and offers @Maya and @Marcus as people — for you to confirm, or not.

Four things it will not do to your notes

An import that quietly mangles two years of material is worse than no import at all. These are the rules, and they are enforced in code, not in a changelog.

It won’t change a word you wrote.

Your words are carried across unchanged, in the order you wrote them. When you link a name to a person, the mention is added on its own line at the end — Notivo never rewrites your sentence to put it there. The only edit it will ever make to the text is one you ask for by name: stripping a stray @here that came from someone else’s tool.

It won’t attribute anything to anyone on its own.

Names default to plain text. Notivo only offers a person when you already wrote @name, or when the name is already on your team list. It does not guess who is a person from your prose — and when two people on your team share a name, it says so and refuses to pick.

It won’t invent a date.

A full date in your text goes into the note’s title. A heading that just says “March” is not a date, and Notivo leaves it alone rather than guessing. When a date could be read two ways — 03/04/2024 — it tells you, instead of quietly picking one.

It won’t write anything you haven’t seen.

The preview lists every note that would be created, in full. Change how the text is split and watch the count change. Uncheck anything you don’t want. Nothing is written until you press Import.

Say the awkward part first

Imported notes are dated today, not back-dated.

This is the one thing people expect and don’t get, so here it is before you spend an evening on it. When you import two years of notes, they arrive dated the day you imported them. If Notivo found a full date in the text, it puts it in the note’s title — 2024-03-15 · 1:1 with Maya — so you can read it and search it. But your per-person timeline shows them as arriving today.

We could fake it. Reading dates out of prose is easy; being right about them is not. A heading that says “March” has no day. A line that says “by the 15th” is a deadline someone mentioned, not the day the note is about. Guess wrong and the note is filed under a day that never happened, looking exactly as trustworthy as the ones that are correct — and you would never find it again to fix it.

So what you get today is your material, searchable, attached to the right people, in one place. What you don’t get yet is a reconstructed history. That is worth building properly and it is on the list; it is not worth faking.

Where the reading happens

Your document never leaves your machine.

Reading the text, splitting it into notes, finding the dates and matching the names all happen in your browser. Nothing you paste is transmitted until you press Import, and what is sent then is the plain text of the notes you approved — never the file.

Paste something, look at the preview, change your mind, close the tab: nothing was ever sent. That is not a policy, it is where the code runs.

Black Box

A vault marker stops the whole import.

If anything in what you paste carries @bb or #bb, Notivo refuses the entire import — not the marked part, all of it — and tells you why. Black Box notes are created only inside the app, so they never travel through an import.

Refusing everything is the point. Importing “the rest” would mean deciding how far the marker reached, and that is not a decision worth being wrong about once.

Getting your notes out, per tool

There is no connector to authorise and no export archive to wait for. Copy works everywhere, including the tools that have no export at all.

If you keep notes in…	Do this
Word	Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, paste into Notivo. (Word has no Markdown export — File → Save As → “Plain Text (.txt)” also works.)
Google Docs	Select all and copy — or File → Download → Markdown and drop the file.
Apple Notes	Open the note, select all, copy. (On macOS 26 there is also File → Export as → Markdown; earlier versions offer PDF only.)
Notion	Copy the page — or ••• → Export → “Markdown & CSV”, which arrives as a .zip you unzip first.
Obsidian	Drop the .md files straight in.
Evernote, OneNote, anything else	Open the note, select all, copy, paste.
A spreadsheet	Copy the cells and paste them. (A .csv file needs a row-per-note rule that isn’t built yet.)

Step-by-step, for every app →

A Windows text file with accented characters is handled too: Notivo works out the encoding and, when it genuinely can’t tell, shows you the alternatives instead of silently mangling every š and č.

What actually happens, step by step

You paste. Notivo reads it, finds the structure, and tells you what it found: “Split into 37 notes, by heading.” If that’s wrong, one click changes the rule — by heading, by date, by paragraph, or all as one note — and the count changes in front of you.

You check the names. Every name it found is listed with how many notes it appears in. Each one starts as plain text. You decide which become people on your team, which get created, and which foreign tags — a stray @here from a chat export — get their sigil removed.

You read the notes. Not a count, the actual notes, in full, with their titles and any date found in the text. Uncheck anything that shouldn’t come across.

You press Import. It writes steadily rather than all at once, tells you how long it will take, and says plainly that you can close the tab. If it stops halfway, run it again: notes already written are recognised, not duplicated.

Your last two years, already inside.

Open Settings → Import, paste the doc you’ve been keeping, and look at the preview. If you don’t like what you see, close the tab — nothing was written, and nothing was sent.

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