Sixteen steps that will definitely save you a lot of time if you’re working with workflows, especially the more complex ones.

Saved me a lot of trouble at work, I had to clone a list along with all of it’s workflows to another site.

Saving the list as template helped me move everything (including all of the custom made forms!), while the workaround below made it possible to simply import the workflows I had in place into the new list!

  1. In SharePoint Designer 2010, select your list and open the workflow you want to export.
  2. Click on “Save” and “Publish” the workflow.
  3. Click on “Export to Visio“. Save the file as CompletedWorkflow.vwi or whatever name you want to give it.
  4. In SP Designer, create or open the list into which you want to import the workflow. There is no way to directly import the exported Visio file into this list.
  5. Create a new EMPTY workflow.
  6. Make sure that you do not add any workflow steps! One will most likely be already there but you can leave it, make sure it’s empty though.
  7. Click on “Save” and “Publish” this empty workflow.
  8. Then, click on “Export to Visio” and save this as EmptyWorkflow.vwi or whatever.
  9. Rename both the vwi files by adding “.zip” extension. The files should be CompletedWorkflow.vwi.zip and EmptyWorkflow.vwi.zip.
  10. The objective is to replace the “workflow.xoml.wfconfig.xml” file from the EmptyWorkflow.vwi.zip into the CompletedWorkflow.vwi.zip.
  11. It is likely that you will not be able to replace it directly. Copy the file out to the desktop and then copy the file into the other zipped folder.
  12. Remove the “.zip” extension from the CompletedWorkflow.vwi.
  13. With this, we have a working importable Visio workflow.
  14. Back in the SharePoint Designer 2010, close all the workflow tabs.
  15. Click on the “Import from Visio” and select the CompletedWorkflow.vwi.
  16. Done!

As always you are welcome to leave suggestions / questions / whatever.

Reference:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/wkng/archive/2012/08/21/exporting-and-importing-sharepoint-designer-2010-list-workflow.aspx

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