Turn sticky notes into a table, and back again

Forty sticky notes is what a good workshop looks like. It is also completely unusable the next morning when someone asks who is doing what by when.

The gap between thinking and tracking

Divergent work wants sticky notes. Convergent work wants rows and columns. Most people bridge that gap by retyping the whole wall into a spreadsheet, which is slow and quietly loses the notes nobody could be bothered to copy.

Retyping also freezes the structure too early. Once it is a spreadsheet, going back to loose exploration means starting over.

A two way conversion removes the penalty. You can move between shapes as often as the work needs, because moving costs one action instead of an hour.

How to do it

1. Select the notes you want to structure

   Drag a marquee around them, or press Cmd A to take everything on the board.

2. Right click and choose Notes into a table

   Each note becomes a row. The note colour is kept, so any colour coding you used during the workshop survives.

3. Add the columns the work actually needs

   Owner, due date, status. Edit cells directly on the board with no separate spreadsheet open.

4. Convert back whenever you want to reopen the thinking

   The same command runs in reverse, turning rows back into notes you can move around freely.

Worth knowing before you start

A note carrying several ideas becomes one row containing several ideas. The conversion is faithful rather than clever, because it does no AI interpretation: it will not split, merge or rewrite what you wrote. If you want one idea per row, split those notes before converting.

Common questions