Sort by Completed Date Question
 

Hi, everyone.

When I have various projects with actions, sub-actions, various due dates, and various completion dates, I noticed OF does not sort by Completed Date accurately unless all of the actions are consistent to some degree. Could someone tell me if this behavior is normal? My main question is, "What needs to be achieved in order for OF to grab the earliest Completed Date and place it to the top?"

I've attached a screenshot. You'll see [B]New Project 3[/B] with an action completed in Feb 2013, but it's not sorted to the top. Any ideas?

Adam

You are looking at a project view, where the sorting unit is projects. If you want to view a sorted list of actions, do it in context mode, where the sorting unit is individual actions. The fact that there may be a very recently completed action in a project matters not at all for the sorting of the projects, unless completing that action completed that project.

In both views, with all else being equal, the items appear in the order they appear in the sidebar. If you look at project view, sorted by completion, and none of the projects are completed, the first project shown will be the first one in the sidebar, for example.

So, if you want a list of all of your completed actions, sorted by when you completed them go to context mode, group by completion date (or ungrouped), sort by completion date, show completed actions, any flag state, any duration, and you should get what you want. If what you want is a list of incomplete projects, sorted by when you last completed something in the project, you may be out of luck, as OmniFocus isn't really set up to do that sort of thing.

I love it! Thank you!! Did I pick your settings correctly?! I've attached another screenshot.

Happy face!! :D

Yes, those settings should be fine. The grouping by completed date variation is useful if you want to look at data where there's a greater range of dates, especially if you want to only look at part of it. You can close the groups that don't interest you, and save it as a perspective with the restore expansion box checked to have it always be shown that way. This is how you make a view that only shows things completed today, for example.

Also, if you're interested (and not afraid of using the command line), it is possible to get the completion date column to show both the time and a more friendly date. For example, the two tasks I just checked off in my database show "Today 8:31 AM" as the completion date. Read about the details here: [url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=19114[/url]

Thanks!
 

Just a simple thanks for posting this answer, whpalmer4 and Revearti for asking!! I had known how to do this, but haven't needed to do it for a while until now.

My question: so, if inside a project, i want to order the actions using "to be completed", is it not possible???

Terrible.
hope that this will be possible in OF2...

Hey Raffo! You can perform a one-time sort on selected actions within a project via Edit > Sort > By … from the menu bar.

I hope that helps!

Ok tks... :)

But will this be improved?
I think it's very useful to be able to view every project in this way.

Very useful a different order: one for projects and one inside projects... :)

If you want to see a flat list of sorted actions under each project, switch to context mode and use the View Bar to set the Grouping to ‘Project’ and Sorting to ‘Due’.

I hope that helps! If you have any requests or additional questions, feel free to email us at [email]omnifocus@omnigroup.com[/email]