[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 ...

It does seem a pity that neither Agenda nor Ecco found a sustainable niche ...

I don't think that the public is stupid, or radically averse to learning, but I do think that en masse it may prefer comfort to adventure :-)

(We have certainly bred wolves into dogs, which, like all other domesticated species, have significantly smaller average cranial capacities than their ancestral populations. Perhaps the same logic is at work in software ... )

For the moment, however, there are at least scripts which yield reasonably powerful filtering in OmniOutliner:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=16396

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...ghlight=filter

But only in the Mac ecosystem - we are all being herded tamely towards a more iOS-like world - more comfort and less power again .... So perhaps one day we will all be lamenting the passing of user scripting ...

(I had better not venture a thought about what the "i" stands for in iOS ... :-)

[rogbar]

Thanks Rob - not just for the reply, but also for all the work you do creating these scripts.

Forgot about Agenda - another lost treasure.

And my dog takes exception to your crack about wolves being smarter.

Originally Posted by rogbar

And my dog takes exception to your crack about wolves being smarter.

Please do convey my apologies :-)

( I'm just not sure that Romulus and Remus would ever have founded Rome if they'd been left in the care of some of the pooches I meet in this city ... )

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