View source for Drag-and-drop / Import -- to make topics, occurrences and associations

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Drag-and-drop is widely used in Topicscape, which can accept many types of items . . . from files and folders, to URL icons in a browser's address bar ("favicon"), emails in an Outlook Express window, even highlighted sections of an MS Word or Excel document. Drop files and the like on rectangles, cones, pyramids, topics in the Hit and History Lists and in the Topic Center. When imported in this way, folders become topics, and files or parts of files become occurrences -- though there is an option to drop folders inside a Topic Center and make an occurrence that points at that folder.

You can only directly drag one folder at a time, though the dragged folder may contain an extensive hierarchy of folders. This hierarchy will be replicated in Topicscape and appear in 3D. Then you can start extending the hierarchy in ways that Windows does not support.

After you drag a folder to the Map or 'Scape window, you will see a small panel (see The power of the 'Create New Topics' panel - avoiding duplicate topics). This lets you control how the folder is introduced to the Topicscape.

Not just drag and drop - added value
With some of these drags and drops, Topicscape does extra work for you:

A folder will be made into a topic, its sub-folders will be made into child topics and so on down the folder tree;
all the files in each folder will become occurrences of the topic made from that folder;
an email has its sender and receiver extracted and added to the details panel for that occurrence (but only if the emails are dragged in directly - not if they are in a folder that is dragged in);
an icon ("favicon"- see Glossary) from the address line of a browser is made into an MHT archive (see Glossary) from a web page including recording its URL in the 'Source' entry of the occurrence; (A right-click drag will do that straight away, and a left-click drag will provide the options of making an MHT or just making a shortcut.) This is described in detail in Saving Web pages to "Web Archive, single files (.mht)" but note that it works equally whether you drag to a Topicscape window or to the Topicscape Box.
a portion of an OLE-compliant document will be wrapped in a new file automatically and have its origin saved in the wrapper so that you can go back to the full document if required. (OLE-compliant documents include MS Word, and MS Excel.)
If you routinely organize project files in Topicscape as a project progresses and have trouble with duplicate files and multiple versions, you'll love this one. You can drop one or more files on the "Duplicate check" panel, see Check for duplicates before introducing a file, and it will tell you if the file is already in that Topicscape and give you a report.

The report shows sizes in bytes, colors different sizes or dates in red, points out if the duplicate in that Topicscape is actually a missing occurrence file, and shows which topic it is in. Then it allows you to control what to do next, one by one (replace, delete the external one or bring it in anyway). This is really useful if you are tidying up multiple copies of different versions of documents that should already be in a Topicscape.

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