How to Index Imported Notes?

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1

Indexing Imported Notes?

New Obsidian user here, and am working through MacSparky’s Field Guide. I’m coming from Evernote, but haven’t yet imported existing notes en masse.

I’ve clipped many articles, quotes, opinion pieces, etc., over the years and want to be able to index certain names, topics, and words across them so I can generate those killer graphs that Obsidian does so well.

Is there a way to select a word or name in one article and have all other instances in all notes linked to it?
For example, I have a number of articles about music. Can I highlight “Scott Joplin” or “Mozart” in one document and automatically create links to all other instance?

I’m super excited to find connections that I’ve never considered before!

Thank you!
Dave in PA

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One thing you can do is use the Text Expand plugin which uses the embedded search with a name change:

~~~expander
"Scott Joplin"
~~~

(You can use backticks instead of tildes — I’m on my phone where tildes are easier to type.)

Then you run a command and that is converted into a list of links.

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Thank you, Cawlin. Will check it out.

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I’m not sure if there’s a point-and-click way of doing this, but in case it helps there is a very fast way of doing this with a global search and replace.

To replace all instances of “Scott Joplin” across your whole vault with a link to the Scott Joplin file, you would do this:

Search for: Scott Joplin

Replace with: [[Scott Joplin]]

Because your vault is brand new, you don’t need to check if the text is already linked. If it is, it will become double-linked with the code above. It’s possible to avoid this with a more complicated “regex” approach, but I think you should be fine in your case.

I would use an external editor like a VSCode to do this, but you can also do it inside Obsidian using a global search and replace plugin.

Make a copy of your vault first, and test it out on the copy.

5

Thanks Alan!
That worked pretty well on my small demo vault.

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