Hi ​@Jennifer P, thank you for adding this feedback! I can certainly understand why this would be beneficial. 

Hi ​@Ambar D, I was looking at this a bit more, and it seems this might be a bug (or intentional) in a couple of Mind Map templates as opposed to an enhancement request for Lucidspark. The expected behavior exists in the application, just not in specific templates.

1. There are two templates, “Simple Mind Map” and “Mind Map with Lines” (group 1) that both work as expected where the user can select a portion of the mind map (one to several items) and duplicate or copy/paste them and the user only gets another set of what they selected.

2. When the user chooses one of the two “Mind Map” templates (group 2), both have an issue where selecting a portion of the mind map and copy/paste or duplicate results in the entire mind map being duplicated instead of only the selected items.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a new LucidSpark from Template
2. Select one of the 4 Mind Map templates as noted above
3. Use as is or add more entries
4. Select one or two idea entries, right-click and select copy, then paste, or duplicate
   1. In the two templates without the issue (group 1), the selected entries are copied/pasted or duplicated as expected
   2. In the two templates with the issue (group 2), the entire mind map is copied/pasted or duplicated, which is not what the user selected.

After further analysis, I noticed that Group 1 templates have the Lock/Unlock feature enabled, and Group 2 templates have the Lock/Unlock feature hidden and disabled. The cause of the issue that people are reporting here is highly likely that the mind map is locked down, which is preventing a user from selecting a portion of the items. While it looks like they are selecting a subset, the lock groups the entire mind map, so the copy/paste and duplicate end up selecting the entire mind map. The restriction on lock may have been done intentionally in the template due to the styling and perhaps cannot be easily unlocked without causing other issues for the user. Your team would need to investigate this further to know for sure.

As a workaround for anyone looking to create a Mind Map where they will need to replicate many of the items over and over in different areas (i.e. have the ability to copy/paste or duplicate sections of the mind map) to select one of the Group 1 templates (“Simple Mind Map” or “Mind Map with Lines”) so that it works as desired. Unfortunately, you would need to start a fresh mind map as it is not possible to change the style of the original mind map since it is locked and disabled.

Hi ​@Jennifer P, thank you so much for adding your detailed feedback and findings to this thread!

I imagine that your suggested workaround here may be helpful to some in this thread and to other users who come across this post! 

You’re correct that this functionality does currently exist in certain templates such as the Simple mind map, Concept map, and the Bubble map example. (as your examples in group 1 also show)

This is different for the templates that you describe in group 2, and for anything using the mind map shape shown below, which do have the limitations of being unable to copy/paste a portion of the mind map.

That’s a very detailed and interesting observation about locking. To give a bit more insight into the status of this idea being set to ‘Validating’ - this means that the product development team is currently scoping out possibilities for this feature and investigating requirements.

Detailed comments just like yours are always helpful to our teams in the process of evaluating feedback! Thank you again! If you would like some more information about the status of feedback, I’d recommend checking out this post:

It is almost unbelievable that you could release a ‘mindmap’ version of the software without the ability to copy and paste branches about. Just buy a license of virtually any competitive product, look, learn and replicate.

The ability to copy part of a diagram is there on other Lucidchart implementations. Who/how did that functionality get removed when Mindmap got added? Very strange decision.

Also I note these requests have been outstanding for a considerable time ~ why? what is blocking this being a priority?

Hi ​@Mike Sanders, thank you for adding to this thread with your feedback and thoughts here. I want to assure you that we value your feedback.

For additional insight here, each month, the community team surfaces the two most popular ideas (indicated by the number of upvotes, views, comments, etc.) to Lucid’s product development team. We commit to keeping you in the loop as much as possible, and this thread still remains the best place for an update on this feature. For more information, I recommend reading through this post.

Also ran into this issue today and would like to request partial copy / paste of branches be included. It makes it nearly impossible to use Lucid Charts as my main tool for mind maps as this feature is pretty much a requirement for managing anything other than simple / basic maps.

Hi ​@Joe E, thank you for adding your support for this feature to be implemented and adding your feedback to this thread!

Hey Micah, I´m currently having the same issue and wanted to know if there has been any progress that would benefit the Lucid community in this need specifically, thank you.

Hi ​@Elí Mejía, thanks for adding to this thread to check in. While we don’t have an update to provide at this time, we always appreciate you sharing your insights on what you'd like to see in our products!

This post has been marked as ‘validating’ and I’d love to shed some light on what this status means. This status means that while the product development team hasn’t committed to the idea, they’re scoping out possibilities and investigating requirements and implications.

To learn more about the statuses that posts may be assigned to, I recommend checking out this post:

This thread remains the best place to receive updates on this feature request! 

The best way to indicate your support for this to be implemented is to upvote this post and leave any additional comments on what you’re hoping to see. 

What’s really frustrating about the lack of this trivially important functionality is that you typically need it when you’ve already invested significant effort into building a mindmap. At least that’s what happened to me. I mapped out a topic (about 40-50 nodes worth) and then realized I need another branch with very similar nodes so I naturally wanted to duplicate it.

At this point I’m stuck between abandoning using Lucid for this altogether, recreate my mindmap in another visualization (maybe simple stickies) or manually copy everything. 

All of these are options I dislike, and the Lucid product team should as well.

I find it surprising that a basic feature (which competitors have had for a long time) first has to undergo a lengthy validation process at Lucid. Even after a year, there has been no progress.

Hi ​@TKenez and ​@romanarnold, 

I certainly understand the frustration here. Thank you both for taking the time to leave your thoughts and feedback, and I can understand why this feature is so essential to a variety of workflows. 

While I can't make any promises at this time, I want to assure you that your feedback is seen and valued, and this thread has been shared with the product team. Thank you again for taking the time to share how important this is to you.

Agreed. This is basic functionality. Even Powerpoint lets you do this.

My specific use cases that brought me here:

1. I was trying to add my area of a mind map that I created in a separate mind map and expected to be able to copy and paste it into the existing mind map that my team was using and couldn't.
2. I created a simple mind map with three main branches. I wanted to duplicate the first one because the structure was similar to what I needed for the third, and couldn’t.

Thank you ​@WZQN75 for adding these details about your use case to this thread and for taking the time to show your support and desire for this feature.