Viewing completed actions with their dates completed?
 

Is it possible to:

(1) See the date/time when you checked an item completed.

(2) View the completed items in order of completion?

Thanks,

doug

[QUOTE=doug@lerner.net;26391]Is it possible to:

(1) See the date/time when you checked an item completed.[/QUOTE]

Yes, in the Date inspector.

[QUOTE=doug@lerner.net;26391](2) View the completed items in order of completion?[/QUOTE]

Yes, by adjusting the View bar filters.


I encourage you to play more with OmniFocus. Your questions are ones which would have been resolved by a little poking around in the interface. If you don't want to play with your live data, make a new user on your machine and play with OmniFocus in that.

i think i understand what [email]doug@lerner.net[/email] is driving at...

saying "use the date inspector" is not a great answer in terms of viewing completion dates. why is there support in the program for displaying start date, due date, and time estimate but [B]not[/B] for displaying completion date? seems like it could easily be added to the view->columns menu. it also seems to me that it would be useful to have the option to show and edit this directly for some perspectives.

i assume the thinking behind this was that 90% of the time, completion date is entered as "now" when you mark a task completed and a lot of the time, you really mostly just want to know yes or no whether a task is completed vs. knowing exactly [I]when[/I] it was completed. that's probably sufficient most of the time.

however, for me, there are tasks (especially tasks that involve delegation to other people) where i sometimes need to "backfill" completion information or where i am reviewing the general progress where it would be good to have completion date as a normal field in the central list window. ... and to take this one step further, i would like to see "completion date" as an option in the group menu as well.

Thanks, dduff. Yes, that is one scenario. In my particular case, I was just wanting to fill in a customer on what was done since our last call, so would have liked to have had a convenient list of items marked as complete since a certain date.

Coconino, thanks for your post. However, I *did* poke around the interface first and did not figure it out which is why I posted here. That is what these forums are for, right?

Thanks,

doug

By the way, even after you pointed me to the Date Inspector, I just tried fiddling with it and still can't figure out how to list the completed items since a certain date.

It certainly isn't obvious to me anyway!

I would like just have the ability to add the date column and then sort on dates, like in Mail, for example.

Thanks,

doug

For that matter, I can't even figure out how to SET a date in the date inspector. After clicking on the little calendar icon and choosing a date, the date then disappears and turns into "none" when I close the calendar selection box.

doug

Changing the completion date works for me.

In Context Mode, set your group-by lozenge in the View Bar--second lozenge from the left--to Due Date. You won't get the dates, but you'll get (surprise) groups. The inspector just lets you, well, inspect data. The View Bar lets you change what actions are viewable.

[QUOTE=dduff617;26433]why is there support in the program for displaying start date, due date, and time estimate but [B]not[/B] for displaying completion date?[/QUOTE]

I can't speak for the Omni Group, but it seems to me it's because OmniFocus was conceived and designed as a task manager. It aims to help people organize and complete their actions, not to be a full-fledged reporting device for those who need to track milestones and account for their time.

You can group actions by completion date, but (not yet) sort them within those groups by completion date. If you want to see actions you've marked complete today, yesterday, in the last week, in the last month, etc., switch to context mode, group (the {} view bar popup) by complete, and show completed actions. That's all I need when I want to review my week and account for my doings.

If you need more, you might consider a project management program like Merlin or OmniPlan, or a time tracker like TimeLog.

One question I still don't understand is this - do you have to set a completion date, or is the date you mark something completed stored?

doug

That's easy enough to test. Clicking the checkbox sets the completion date.