Sorting by context/due-date/start-date
 

I am in "planning mode", with my inbox (and sometimes some a couple of other projects in some folder) selected. Now, I want to sort the actions from the inbox+selected-projects by due date (or sometimes, folder - whatever). It appears this is impossible! I asked omnifocus support, and the only way they had was to select all the action items, then go to Edit->Sort and select "By Due Date". (I'm fairly new to omnifocus, please bear with me for any silliness in the post!)

1. I think this should be possible by clicking the "Due" button in the view, this seems pretty basic functionality to me.

2. Given that the functionality is not there, is there some way to script this, so that I can do the equivalent of selecting all items, edit->sort->by due date with a single key combination? Omnifocus support mentioned that there are apple experts in this forum, and suggested I ask here.

Thanks!!

Sorry for the confusion! I assume you have the inbox and other items selected in the sidebar of Project view? If so, all you need to do is select

View -> Focus on <selected items>
and then
View -> Context View

The first command hides the projects you don't have selected. (To reverse this, use "Show All Projects" under the View menu.) The second command puts you into a mode where the items in the window can be sorted against each other in the manner you're looking for. Any of the "Sort By" options in the View menu will give you the results it sounds like you're after.

Why do it this way? Well, project mode supports both parallel (steps can happen in any order) and sequential (steps must be done top-to-bottom) projects. In order to avoid messing up the latter kind of project, Project mode sorts them against each other, but we won't mess with the contents of any of the projects...

Hello,

I did view focus after selecting inbox and another project. Then I did I Focus, all good. The moment I choose View->Show in context do this, the moment I click on either "Show in Context Mode" or "Context Mode", inbox items are gone from the focused list. Is this a bug?

Also, what's the difference between "context mode" and "show in context mode" in the view menu? Thanks.

In the sidebar of Context view, do you see a "No Context" item? Stuff from the inbox should appear there.

The "Show in Context Mode" menu item does everything the "Context Mode" item does and a bit more. Specifically, if you have rows selected in Project mode, it attempts to keep those rows selected after the switch. When you're in Context mode, that menu item switches you back to Project mode.

(I mainly find that command useful when I want to select an action in Context mode, then flip back to Project mode and examine the project that action's from.)

It doesn't really make any sense in the original request to try to sort items drawn from both Inbox [b]and[/b] projects, or even just multiple projects, so long as you are looking at a project view.

However, if you are only considering items in the Inbox, you might well wish to sort them as you work on processing them into projects. It would be nice if you could just click on the column headers, as you propose, to sort things, but alas, OmniFocus doesn't support that. You can use the Edit->Sort option (or right-click and choose Sort from the popup menu) however without much concern that you are disturbing the sequencing of actions in your projects because you haven't processed them yet. I was able to assign a keyboard shortcut to one of them via the Keyboard section in System Preferences and use it to sort a handful of selected actions in the Inbox.