Exporting your JW Library notes to text, Markdown or a fresh backup
Get your JW Library notes out of the app: copy or export them as Markdown/plain text for use anywhere, or extract a selection into a new .jwlibrary backup. All in your browser.
Notes written in JW Library are easy to read inside the app and awkward to use anywhere else — in a document, in a talk outline, on paper, or in the hands of someone who does not use the app. Exporting solves that, and the main decision is not how to export but how much: a filtered export is almost always more useful than everything at once.
Your study notes shouldn't be trapped inside one app. Sometimes you want them as plain text — to paste into a talk outline, a document, or your own notes app — and sometimes you want a clean backup containing just a subset. Study Explorer does both, reading your backup entirely in the browser.
Step by step
Load your backup
Create a backup in JW Library (Personal Study → Backup and Restore → Create a backup), then open jwsync.org and load it into Study Explorer.
Find the notes you want
Use search plus colour, tag and publication filters to narrow to exactly the notes you're after — one publication, one tag, one topic.
Copy or export as Markdown/text
Copy notes out as Markdown or plain text to paste anywhere. Formatting (bold, italic, lists) is preserved so structured notes stay structured.
Or extract to a fresh backup
Prefer a file? Export a selection or date range into a new .jwlibrary backup — useful for archiving a project or handing a specific set of notes to another device.
Why export at all
Notes are more useful when they can travel: into a document for a part on the meeting, into a personal wiki, into a printout for someone who doesn't use the app. Markdown keeps the structure while staying readable as plain text anywhere.
Choosing a format
Plain text is the most portable and pastes cleanly into any document or email. Formatted output preserves the structure of longer notes and suits printing or sharing. If you want the notes back inside JW Library later — on another device, or for someone else's library — keep the .jwlibrary file itself rather than a text export, since only that preserves the links between notes, highlights, tags and the exact place in the publication they are anchored to.
Exporting only part of your library
A full export of years of study is rarely what you want. Narrowing first — to a tag, a publication, a highlight colour, or a date range — produces something you can actually use, such as every note tagged for a talk, or everything written during one convention. The same filters that narrow the view narrow the export, so what you see is what you get.
What travels with the text, and what does not
An export carries your words. It does not carry the anchors that tie a note to a specific paragraph of a specific publication, because those references only mean something inside JW Library. This is the practical reason to keep backups as well as exports: an export is for reading, printing and sharing outside the app, while a .jwlibrary file is what puts the notes back into a library with their context intact.
Pulling together everything for one talk or assignment
This is the most common reason to export. Filter to the tag, publication or date range the material sits under, check the result, and export just that. What you get is a single document containing the relevant notes and the passages you highlighted, in the order they appear, rather than an unmanageable dump of your whole library.
Sharing notes with someone else
There are two different things people mean by sharing. If the other person wants to read your notes, a text export is right — it opens anywhere and needs no special software. If they want the notes inside their own JW Library, anchored to the same paragraphs and carrying their tags and colours, then a .jwlibrary file is what you want instead, because a text export cannot put anything back into the app.
Keeping an archive you can still read later
Exports are also worth making for their own sake. A plain-text copy of your study notes will still open in thirty years on software nobody has written yet, which is not something any app-specific format can promise. Keeping both — the .jwlibrary for restoring and a text export for reading — costs almost nothing and covers both futures.
Export or backup — which you need
The two answer different questions. An export is for using your notes outside JW Library: reading, printing, quoting, sending to someone. A .jwlibrary backup is for putting them back into JW Library, on this device or another, with every anchor, tag and colour intact. Neither substitutes for the other, and there is no reason not to keep both.
Frequently asked questions
- Does exporting change my JW Library notes?
- No. Export reads a copy of your backup in the browser; your original file and your app are untouched.
- Can I export everything at once?
- Yes — clear the filters to select your whole library, or narrow down first to export just part of it.
- Can I get my notes into Word or Google Docs?
- Yes — export as text and paste it in. The text arrives with its structure intact and can be styled from there.
- Do highlights export as well as notes?
- Yes, including the highlighted passage and its colour, so a printed copy shows what you marked as well as what you wrote.
- Can I export everything at once?
- Yes, though a filtered export is usually more useful. Everything can be exported in one pass when you want a complete copy.
- Can I export the answers I typed into study questions?
- Yes. Typed study answers are part of your personal study data and can be exported along with notes and highlights.
- Will an export include which publication each note belongs to?
- Yes, the export identifies where each note came from, even though the underlying anchor only functions inside JW Library.
- Does exporting change anything in my library?
- No. An export reads your data and writes a separate file; nothing in JW Library is altered, moved or removed by it.
- Can I export from a backup rather than the app?
- Yes. A .jwlibrary file can be opened directly and its notes exported, which is useful when the notes you want are in an old backup rather than on your current device.