Viewing completed actions with their dates completed?

[doug@lerner.net]

Is it possible to:

(1) See the date/time when you checked an item completed.

(2) View the completed items in order of completion?

Thanks,

doug

[coconino]

Is it possible to:

(1) See the date/time when you checked an item completed.

Yes, in the Date inspector.

(2) View the completed items in order of completion?

Yes, by adjusting the View bar filters.


I encourage you to play more with OmniFocus. Your questions are ones which would have been resolved by a little poking around in the interface. If you don't want to play with your live data, make a new user on your machine and play with OmniFocus in that.

[dduff617]

i think i understand what doug@lerner.net is driving at...

saying "use the date inspector" is not a great answer in terms of viewing completion dates. why is there support in the program for displaying start date, due date, and time estimate but not for displaying completion date? seems like it could easily be added to the view->columns menu. it also seems to me that it would be useful to have the option to show and edit this directly for some perspectives.

i assume the thinking behind this was that 90% of the time, completion date is entered as "now" when you mark a task completed and a lot of the time, you really mostly just want to know yes or no whether a task is completed vs. knowing exactly when it was completed. that's probably sufficient most of the time.

however, for me, there are tasks (especially tasks that involve delegation to other people) where i sometimes need to "backfill" completion information or where i am reviewing the general progress where it would be good to have completion date as a normal field in the central list window. ... and to take this one step further, i would like to see "completion date" as an option in the group menu as well.

[doug@lerner.net]

Thanks, dduff. Yes, that is one scenario. In my particular case, I was just wanting to fill in a customer on what was done since our last call, so would have liked to have had a convenient list of items marked as complete since a certain date.

Coconino, thanks for your post. However, I *did* poke around the interface first and did not figure it out which is why I posted here. That is what these forums are for, right?

Thanks,

doug

[doug@lerner.net]

By the way, even after you pointed me to the Date Inspector, I just tried fiddling with it and still can't figure out how to list the completed items since a certain date.

It certainly isn't obvious to me anyway!

I would like just have the ability to add the date column and then sort on dates, like in Mail, for example.

Thanks,

doug

[doug@lerner.net]

For that matter, I can't even figure out how to SET a date in the date inspector. After clicking on the little calendar icon and choosing a date, the date then disappears and turns into "none" when I close the calendar selection box.

doug

[curt.clifton]

Changing the completion date works for me.

In Context Mode, set your group-by lozenge in the View Bar--second lozenge from the left--to Due Date. You won't get the dates, but you'll get (surprise) groups. The inspector just lets you, well, inspect data. The View Bar lets you change what actions are viewable.

[brianogilvie]

why is there support in the program for displaying start date, due date, and time estimate but not for displaying completion date?

I can't speak for the Omni Group, but it seems to me it's because OmniFocus was conceived and designed as a task manager. It aims to help people organize and complete their actions, not to be a full-fledged reporting device for those who need to track milestones and account for their time.

You can group actions by completion date, but (not yet) sort them within those groups by completion date. If you want to see actions you've marked complete today, yesterday, in the last week, in the last month, etc., switch to context mode, group (the {} view bar popup) by complete, and show completed actions. That's all I need when I want to review my week and account for my doings.

If you need more, you might consider a project management program like Merlin or OmniPlan, or a time tracker like TimeLog.

[doug@lerner.net]

One question I still don't understand is this - do you have to set a completion date, or is the date you mark something completed stored?

doug

[curt.clifton]

That's easy enough to test. Clicking the checkbox sets the completion date.

[doug@lerner.net]

That's easy enough to test. Clicking the checkbox sets the completion date.

I guess I am just not seeing how this works. Where do I see these completed dates? For example, I tried adding a date column, but it doesn't show up there...

doug

[eronel]

You can see the completed date for an individual task in the Date Inspector. You can group and sort tasks by completion date in the context mode using the view bar. But there's presently no way to see the completion date displayed as a column in a table of tasks, as you can with the start and due dates.

[doug@lerner.net]

I guess this one needs some more work. I can't get it to work consistently. I can see that if I go to the Date Inspector one-by-one with each task I can see the "changed" date.

But as I go through the different menus - context, then view then trying to sort by completed, things just slip and slide around, and I get different views, and nothing sticks and... it seems like it takes like a dozen clicks to get where I want to go and then I don't end up there when I do. And if a window closes you have to start all over.

So obviously this kind of view needs some more work, I think... It is very confusing and I still can't quite get it to work.

doug

[curt.clifton]

Are you trying to sort by completion date in Planning mode or when grouped by something else? Projects in Planning mode and groupings in either mode take precedence.

Also, when you eventually do get the view that you want, save it as a perspective. Perspectives are a great way to avoid future fiddling.

[s1dorner]

You can group actions by completion date, but (not yet) sort them within those groups by completion date. If you want to see actions you've marked complete today, yesterday, in the last week, in the last month, etc., switch to context mode, group (the {} view bar popup) by complete, and show completed actions.

The first time I did this, I got exactly two groups; "Within the last month" and "None". Not useful.

Then I switched from Project to Context view, and suddenly got the today/yesterday/within the last month groupings you mention. Useful. :-)

I'm not sure I understand why the grouping behaves differently in the different views, but at least I can mostly do what I want to do.

I would, however, like to be able to Export... the OmniFocus database and chew on it with a spreadsheet or database. That seems to me like it would be a reasonable way to augment OF's streamlined day-to-day features with some fancier reporting. Export doesn't seem to export completed dates, though I see on the Extras forum that there is at least one AppleScript that purports to do so. Perhaps this is another avenue for the original poster to get what he (and I) want.

[Lizard]

The grouping adapts to the data available. It's likely you had a different list of actions showing in the Project and Context views. In project view, with no tasks completed today, there was no reason to show that group.

[s1dorner]

The grouping adapts to the data available. It's likely you had a different list of actions showing in the Project and Context views. In project view, with no tasks completed today, there was no reason to show that group.

The same tasks were visible in both views.

On further examination, it appears that it groups by action completion date in Context mode, and project completion date in Project mode.