[rogbar]

For anyone like me who deeply misses the late, great, Ecco Pro, I've discovered a way to get OmniOutliner to perform one of Ecco's greatest tricks: to filter the items in an outline based on values assigned to each item in a column, and thus see your data from a different point of view.

I create columns to assign certain values to items, such as what department or individual an item is attached to, or what city or month it'll take place in, or what status I've assigned to the item ... anything. As long as the columns are TEXT and not Pop-Up Lists, that columnar text is searchable (from the Search box at the top of the Utilities Drawer). So I use a symbol to create a "virtual tag" - a search string that is not likely to appear in the main text items, such as /Chicago or /Sales or /Fred. Now, if I enter /Chicago in the Search box, I get a list of just those items with that columnar value, and they appear in the order in which they appear in the main outline.

This may be uninteresting and useless to many of you, but for those of us who used to use Ecco, and who have been frustrated at the seeming inability of any other program to perform some of its functions, this is a banner day for me. Maybe I need to get out more ...