I'm a heavy user of Workflowy, which is an amazing tool for taking notes. The structure of the notes is very hierarchical. It's pretty much a mind map using nested bullets points which you can drill down into.

I had a random idea that it would make quite an interesting visualization to be able to dump an entire Workflowy account into a Neo4j graph database.

So I span up Neo4j in a local Docker container, and wrote a LINQPad script which parses an exported Workflowy data file, and dumps each node into the Neo4j database.

Unfortunately I can't share my Workflowy database - as it contains personal / business information. However, I have included a simple demo database that Workflowy use in their live demo. If you use Workflowy yourself, you can easily use this code and the following steps to visualize your own Workflowy data ...

Prerequisites

• Docker
• LINQPad

Instructions

• Clone this repo to a folder of your choice.
• In a command prompt, navigate to this repos's folder, and type docker-compose up. The first time you do this, it'll need to download the Neo4j image, so will take a bit longer. From then onwards, it'll be much faster.
• Once done, navigate to http://localhost:7474 to view the Neo4j browser.
• You're now required to change the default password. Login with username neo4j and password neo4j, and when prompted change the password to blah. This is the password used in the LINQPad script. It's only local, so doesn't need to be secure.
• In Workflowy, choose Export All, select Plain Text, then save to a file called Workflowy.txt in this repo's folder. Overwriting the demo one that's already in the folder (or you can use this demo version if you don't already have a Workflowy account).
• Run the Neo4j LINQPad script found in this repo.
• Once complete, navigate back to the Neo4j browser in your web browser.
• Run the following query ...

MATCH (node:Node)
WHERE node.Name = "Workflowy"
RETURN node

You'll now see the following ...

Double click on it, and it'll pop out its child nodes. Double click on those to drill in.

Below is a screenshot using a Workflowy database that Workflowy use as an example Workflowy ...

This isn't my data, and I just included it to give an example of how it looks. It's not as fun as browsing your own data though. Also, a screenshot doesn't really do it justice, as the Neo4j browser has really nice animations of the nodes, and you can drag them around. I'm planning on writing a blog post about this, and when I do, I'll include a few animated gifs to show this.