Quote:
Originally Posted by DerekM
I'm sorry this caused you confusion. The outline column can not be deleted, nor does it make any sense to be able to delete it because that is your "outline."
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This may be true from a coding perspective, but it is false from a GUI perspective. Once the functionality for deleting or inserting columns was added to the app, it created the potential for a user wanting to delete the 1st column - and there is nothing in the GUI to indicate visually that this can't be done. Nor does your "logic" that "this is the outline" hold up - such logic needs visual support from the GUI and doesn't have it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DerekM
Out of curiosity, what were you expecting to happen if you could delete the outline column?
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Here's what I was doing. I sometimes use OmniOutliner as a sort of "super text editor" - which by the way is part of your company's sales pitch for it - the main product page for OO even brags that you can use it to "write screenplays," ha ha ha. Well, anyway, I
do sometimes find it useful for a few text editing tasks, just as I have used other folding-outline editors previously (e.g. Emacs). If you have a long text document, you can work visually on just a section at a time - very handy. And being able to print only selected sections is also handy.
So what I did in this case was (a) import an RFT text I was working on, thus forming the first column, and then (b) write comments in a column to the right about this original text. When I was done, I wanted to keep only my comments - i.e. keep only the second column & dispose of the first. This proved (apparently) to be impossible to do in any single operation. I could not find a way to select and thus copy the new column's text as a column. Nor could I find a way to delete the original column, even if I moved columns around.
I tried the Utilities drawer and the Inspector - no apparent help there. I then searched the documentation. Nada. Finally I searched the forum - and found the one old complaint about this, in which hoardingbottles was treated as if he did not have a valid issue. This ticked me off.
hoardingbottles had a good idea: find a way to indicate in the Utilities drawer that the left hand column is different. Or like I say, just put a quick line in the help - not to "fix" this relatively minor issue, but simply to admit of its existence. Had I found such a line, my vexation would quickly have subsided; obviously no app can do everything or be perfect in every way.