Drag and Drop into columns
 

We are about to start a new course in September. There is a package that enables you to build lessons via an interface ... any guesses to which OS it requires? :mad:

Anyway I *know* OOPro will do it better. What I will ultimately have is an outline, organised by lesson, with columns containing documents, animations, videos or whatever. Is there anyway of convincing OOP to accept these files (or links to them) via drag and drop. When I have tried it the link ends up in the main outline, rather than in the position I want it to be.

Just remember ... I am still a clueless newbie, memerised by OmniDazzle!:D

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Z

If that other application will export OPML then you can import the data into OmniOutliner. Otherwise you may have to process it in some other way first.

Clarification
 

I doubt if it will. However the actual information it compiles is in PDF, Word or SWF formats. I really want a way of setting the main outline to give me eg Lesson1, with columns for teachers' notes (Column 1), Worksheets (Col2), Animations (Column 3).
What I am trying to do is drag, say, the animation for lesson 2 directly into the 3rd column, but it ends up as being part of the main outline (eg a child of lesson 2)

Any clearer?

I think James misread your question. (And his advice doesn't make sense anyway, since OPML does not support columns.)

Anyway, drag and drop directly into columns works for me *as long as* the column cell is selected first (i.e. before you actually do the drag and drop). Otherwise, as you've found, you can only drag and drop to the main outline. This is a bit of a pain, but you get used to it.

On the positive side, OO does let you place multiple attachments in the same column cell, which can be convenient. For instance, if you have a column titled "URL", you can put two URLs there if you like.

[QUOTE=AlanY]I think James misread your question. (And his advice doesn't make sense anyway, since OPML does not support columns.)[/QUOTE]

I did misunderstand the question. Alan's advice about the placement of attachments is correct.

OPML's support for columns is up for debate. OPML is so loosely defined that you can (ab)use the arbitrary addition of item attributes to add item metadata. This is what OmniOutliner and several other outliner do. The main problem is with notes. We encode our notes using the "_notes" attribute where other outliners use a different name.

Until we get a real XML outline specification this is the best we can do. I thought OML[1] was going to take off but it really hasn't. XOXO[2] seems to have some traction but doesn't do columns elegantly.

[1] [url]http://oml.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/news[/url]
[2] [url]http://microformats.org/wiki/xoxo[/url]