[whpalmer4]

By the way, as I notice you are also an OmniFocus user -- the default behavior in OmniFocus is the opposite. There, if you drag a file, you get the alias that you wanted here, and you have to take extra steps if you really want to embed the file in the database. A bit confusing, perhaps, but with some thought it makes sense. In OmniOutliner, you are probably intending to take all that data with you if you move the outline to another machine, so you would prefer (for most cases, admittedly not yours) to embed the files. In OmniFocus, where you may be syncing the file to a mobile device with limited capacity (cpu, storage, and ability to open arbitrary file types), most of the time you don't want the files embedded. Each program is optimized to make what is expected to be the more usual case easier.