Perspective question
 

Hi. I'm just starting out with OmniFocus and have a question, which I hope isn't dumb. I guess it's a perspective I'm looking for. I'm looking to limit a window to just one folder of projects, and only view projects with actions in them. I have right now a bunch of empty projects, so I'd only like to see them if they have actions. It would just look neater. Can I do this?

Thanks a lot.

Not a dumb question, no worries.

You can get a view of only projects in a given folder by clicking on the folder in the sidebar. Unfortunately, that won't hide those projects which do not have any available actions. To do that, you have to work a little harder.

One approach is to focus on that folder, then switch to context mode, and group by project. The view you get will be similar to but not identical to what you would see in project mode. You'll see a group for each project that has actions either available or remaining, depending on your choice of settings.

Another approach would be to install Rob Trew's excellent [URL="http://bit.ly/OF-Find2"]Where in OF[/URL] script. You could then do a search like "projects where (name of its folder contains <txt>) and (number of available tasks is not 0)" (the script will prompt you for the value of <txt>) and you'll see only projects in that folder with available tasks. It basically goes through your sidebar and clicks on all the projects that match that condition, then focuses on the result. It really is pretty darn cool :-)

Thanks a lot. Rob's script looks really cool, but not sure I'd want to use that. I'd have to run it every time, plus if I add an action to a previously empty project, I'd have to re-run the script.

In the first approach, when grouping by project, it shows me all of them, with what looks like an action of the same name as the project underneath the collapsable heading. Does this make sense? Not sure what I'm seeing.

Thanks again.

Yes, that's the project itself—check off all of the children and the parent becomes available.

Ken,

View → Hide Parent Items in Context Mode will hide those projects that would show up when you completed all of the actions — it seems like that is what you were looking for.

Thanks to both of you. It's looking a lot better. I definitely like this in Context Mode, but is there really no easy way to get this effect in Project Mode? Or is there some key concept here that I'm missing?

There's no easy way to hide empty but active projects completely when in project view. If you know they are going to be empty for a while, you can put them on hold and only show Active projects, but you'll need to remember to put them back to Active when you add some actions. Your review process can help with that.

Ok, thanks a lot for all the help. I did see that what I wanted is on their list of requests, so hopefully it will be implemented sooner than later.