How to Copy from a Previous Agenda

When to use this instead of the Library

Copying from a previous agenda is for one-off retrieval — pulling something across from an earlier meeting without going to the trouble of saving it to the Library first. It's most useful when you occasionally want to copy something from one specific (known) agenda to another. A good example would be for the Annual Meeting of the Town Council. If it's something you'll want to reuse again and again, save it to the Library instead — see About the Library.

How to copy an item

1. On the agenda view, click the Library dropdown next to the item you want to insert relative to.

2. Under Insert After This Item, Insert as Child of This Item, or Replace This Item, choose Copy from Previous Agenda (or Replace from Previous Agenda).

3. The Copy from Previous Agenda picker opens, in two stages:

   • Committee — a dropdown of all committees, defaulting to the current meeting's committee. Change this to browse a different committee's history.
   • Agenda — once a committee is chosen, a list of that committee's committed agendas appears on the left, most recent first. Click one to load its items in the right-hand panel.

4. The right panel lists the Agenda Items from that meeting, in agenda order.

   Only genuine Agenda Items appear here — things that were formally on the published agenda. Anything that was only ever added to the Minutes during the meeting itself won't show up in this list, since this tool is specifically for reusing agenda content rather than minute records.

5. Tick the items you want to copy. Every item has its own checkbox — parents and sub-items alike, so you can be as precise as you like:

   • Ticking a parent ticks its sub-items too, as a convenience. Untick any sub-item you don't want to bring across.
   • You can also tick a sub-item on its own, without its parent. A sub-item copied this way is promoted to a top-level item. For example, ticking just 1.1 and 1.2 to insert after item 10 copies them in as 11 and 12.
   • Ticking a parent together with some of its sub-items keeps them nested. Ticking 1, 1.1 and 1.2 copies them in as 11, 11.1 and 11.2. If you leave one out in the middle — say you tick 1, 1.1 and 1.3 but not 1.2 — only the items you ticked are copied, and they're renumbered without gaps, so the sub-item that was 1.3 arrives as 11.2.

   Use Expand All to open every level at once, and Select All / Clear to tick or untick everything.

6. For any item with attached files, papers, or links, an Attachments toggle appears. Expand it to review what's attached and untick anything you don't want to bring across — everything is ticked by default.

7. Click the submit button to copy.

What's copied

• Title and agenda text (placeholders are filled in automatically, just as with Library insertion)
• Tags
• Files and papers (opt-in — ticked by default; untick individually to exclude)
• Links (opt-in — ticked by default)
• Sub-items — but only the ones you actually tick. A ticked sub-item whose parent you didn't tick becomes a new top-level item; a ticked sub-item under a ticked parent stays nested beneath it.

Minutes content and approval/adoption flags are never copied, regardless of how the source item's flags were set.

Insert position

Copying uses the same three insert positions as inserting from the Library — after an item, as a child of an item, or as a full replacement (which permanently deletes the selected item and its children). For the full explanation of how each position affects numbering, see How to Create and Use a Library Item.

One difference in Replace mode: unlike the Library — where Replace always swaps in a single item — copying from a previous agenda lets you tick several items (and sub-items) to take the place of the one you're replacing. They're inserted together at that position, with the same promote-and-nest rules described above.

One difference from the Library: there's no Move option when copying from a previous agenda. Move permanently removes the inserted items from their source once they're placed, but a committed agenda can't be changed — so copying always leaves the original agenda exactly as it was. (You can still tick items from anywhere in the source agenda and bring them all across in one go.)