Hi @chrismiller , thanks for posting to share your experience with our Collaborative AI features! We’re glad to hear this has been helpful so far and would love to learn more about your use case.

 The Summarize option you mentioned should work to generate text summary of your process flow diagrams in Lucidchart. Just to confirm my understanding of what you described- are you wanting to automate this process through an integration with Google Docs, so that the generated text summary will automatically be created in a Google Doc rather than a Container within your Lucidchart document?

Hi ​@Emma D , thank you for your reply!

Yes, I’d still love to automate this process into a Google Doc—we continue to run into this same need and pain point.

The Summarize feature is great for condensing many steps into 3–5 high-level actions. However, that’s not what I need for SOP’s and work instructions. 

If I have 20+ steps in a Lucidchart process flow, I don’t want them summarized—I want the exact text from each step copied or exported into a numbered list format to use in a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) or Work Instruction.

Ideal scenario:

• I create or update a Lucidchart process map and each step (rectangle shape) contains editable text.

• A linked Google Doc is automatically updated with those steps, formatted as a numbered list (1. Step 1 text, 2. Step 2 text, etc.).

Current limitations:

• When I highlight and copy the shapes, they paste into Google Docs as an image or container, which:

  • Makes the text unreadable (especially with 20+ steps).

  • Requires cropping or formatting.

  • Is not editable inside the Doc (I cannot modify formatting of the text)

At a minimum, I’d love a way to:

• Copy the text content from multiple shapes in order, and

• Paste it directly into a Google Doc or Word Doc as a numbered list, like this:

1. exact object text 1
2. exact object text 2 
3. exact object text 3
4. exact object text 4 
5. exact object text 5 
6. exact object text 6
7. exact object text 7
8. exact object text 8
9. ……..and on for as many steps I highlighted.

Let me know if there’s a way to do this now—or if this could be considered for a feature. This would be a huge time-saver for anyone turning diagrams into SOPs or work instructions.

Thank you again!

-Chris Miller

Hi ​@chrismiller, thank you for continuing this post and sharing more details about your use case! It sounds like you’re looking for a way to automatically extract text from each step of your process map and bring that into a Google Doc, is this correct? 

If that is the case, this unfortunately isn’t currently supported in Lucid. However, you may find the option to export your document as a CSV file of the shape data helpful in achieving something similar. The CSV export includes text information which you can copy/paste into a Google Doc. You can find this export option by going to File > Export > CSV of shape data. Tip: you can paste the text into Google Doc while holding Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac) to paste without the table formatting then quickly apply the numbered list formatting to create a numbered list. 

That said, we’re very interested in your feedback and committed to continually improving our products. If you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear more details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience within this thread.

I’ve also converted this post to an idea so that it’s visible to others within the Product Feedback section of the community - from here, they can upvote it and add details of their own.

Finally, for more information on how Lucid manages feedback via this community, take a look at this post:

Thank you for sharing your ideas and feedback in the community. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions!

Thank you for your post ​@Leianne C. 

Unfortunately the Export to CSV creates much more work -- removing, reviewing, then copy/paste again, among other actions within a very large document. I found in the past that exporting to CSV and cleaning up is much more cumbersome than retyping the steps manually. Especially since all shapes are exported to CSV and not just what I select. 

I hope this easy copy/paste gets built at some point in the future.

Thank you again for your comment. 

-Chris

Hi ​@chrismiller, thank you for giving that workaround a try and sorry to hear it wasn’t suitable for your use case. It looks like I didn’t convert your post last time.

I have converted it to an idea now so that it is shared with our development team, and other users with a similar request can upvote. Thank you!