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Variable Import/Export

  • July 26, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 452 views

Jenni_Merrifield

I love the new variables feature but have hit a snag I’d love to see resolved.

As I’m the only UX practitioner at my company, we only have the professional plan which means we can’t use branching. Instead, we have developed a system where we initial design in a “WIP” file, which is reviewed and iterated on until approved; at this point, we copy things over to a “Live” file. While working through that with some variables now in use, I discovered that there’s no way to copy variables between files.

I can’t just use variables stored in a library because I need to get the variables from our WIP Library project into the Live Library product and, by their very nature, they can’t refer to the same library of variables (changes made to a variable value for the WIP library shouldn’t be automatically updated in the LIVE library). It would be helpful if one could either export and import variables by collection or individually. Or even if one could select one or more variables to copy and then paste them into another file.

1 reply

Arthur
  • New Participant
  • May 29, 2026

Hey Jenni. I know DSO can do this. You can select specific variables and export/import them. If you have related links inside, copy them together. Or if you have external aliases check that external library is connected to file before import.

Yo can also batch relink your master components to copied variables and even mockups (apply to all file pages), but it's not so fast, about 15 minutes for huge libraries.