Due date as "start date plus X days" (and vice versa)?
 

Hi all,

I suspect this may have been asked before, and I've tried searching but haven't come up with anything, so apologies if this the case.

I love the natural language date feature in Omnifocus - along with the smart autocomplete it's one of my favourite things.

Is there a way of setting the due date to be dependent on the start date (or vice-versa) without working it out manually in your head?

For example: I can say "2d" to set the start date to 2 day's time (Saturday). But if I want the due date to be, say, 3 days after that I have to work it out (and hit 5d). Obviously this isn't too hard for simple numbers of days, but if one is using a phrase like "2w sat" it would be nice to be able to refer back to that start date, whatever it is, in the due date.

Similarly, in reverse, if I have a hard deadline for a given date, and I know the task might take me 5 days it would be nice to be able to type in the due date, tab back to the start date and type something like "due -5d" to refer to the due date.

Is there a way of doing this which I'm missing?

Many thanks!

You could use an AppleScript to calculate & set the due date from the start date. Ask about that in the Extras forum.

There's a first sketch of something like this at:

[URL="http://bit.ly/OFStartDue"]http://bit.ly/OFStartDue[/URL]

[COLOR="White"]--[/COLOR]

Excellent, thank you both - I'll have a play with the script RobTrew linked to.

[QUOTE=RobTrew;100276]There's a first sketch of something like this at:

[URL="http://bit.ly/OFStartDue"]http://bit.ly/OFStartDue[/URL]

[COLOR="White"]--[/COLOR][/QUOTE]
Hi RobTrew, thank you for making the script. I am trying to use this script to set the start date for a task where I have entered in the due date, and I want the start date to be 1 week before the due date. I typed in dd=sd-1w but I get this error:

[I]Error Number:Can’t make missing value into type number.
-1700[/I]

I've also tried dd=sd-7d but that doesn't work either. Do you have any idea why? Any help is appreciated!

OK please ignore my previous post. I clicked on the draft script link which must be an older version. Once I used script from the link at the bottom of the page it worked. Thanks!