[HappyDude]

So, I haven't been around in the OF forum for a few weeks, thankfully I've actually gotten quite a bit done utilizing OF to a full extent. Weeks ago I have many projects and numerous available actions but now I have less than a handful.

Well, today I came to OF forum and little by little noticed some people use other Omni products. I love OF so much I figured why not try out 2 other programs. The first being OmniOutliner and the 2nd being, OmniPlan which I have yet to test out.

I'm wondering if these applications sync and work well with OF? I've gone ahead and downloaded the programs from their appropriate pages on the Omni site. I've only used OmniOutliner so far and I love that I already practically know how to use it, considering the keyboard commands are the same as OF's.

During my "trial" (is it a trial or am I using a limited version?) am I limited and not able to see any OF syncing capabilities?

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about integrating these other Omni products into my daily life, but then again that's the same way how I felt about OF...and now I can't live w/o it!

[whpalmer4]

The trials are all full-functioning versions, until they have expired (and you can't miss the notification when they do). At the moment, everything is intended for standalone use, though there is some support for importing and exporting documents between the applications, and linking. You can make a link to a specific action or project in OmniFocus and paste it into another document which will be of the form omnifocus:///task/<id> -- just select the action or project, right or control-click and select Copy As Link, then paste where you want it.

OmniFocus can import OmniOutliner files, if you want to use the outliner for sketching out thoughts on projects before bringing them into your workflow. A more typical practice might be to simply keep some sorts of material in OmniOutliner (a review checklist, for example) and incorporate it by reference instead of spelling out those steps as actual OmniFocus actions. You can embed a link to a document by simply dragging and dropping the document into the notes field of a project or action.

There has been some talk of interlinking of OmniFocus and OmniPlan in the 2.0 releases of both products. This might allow one to draw up the overall plan for a complex project (possibly incorporating multiple personnel) in OmniPlan, but then execute the tasks from OmniFocus, with progress updates flowing back into OmniPlan. Right now, you can export an OmniPlan document to OmniOutliner format and from there import into OmniFocus, but you can't go the other way, and there's no way except marking things off in both programs to update OmniPlan as you execute from OmniFocus. You can embed links to OmniPlan tasks in much the same way as for OmniFocus; select the task, right or control-click and select Copy As Link, paste the link where you want it. You could set up links back to OmniPlan that way, though it would be a bit tedious. The bigger drawback is that the export to OmniOutliner will lose all the information about dependencies, and you'll just get a list of actions without any indication that task A must be done before task B can start, but tasks C and D have no such relationship and can be done in either order.

They've got a big blank canvas on which to work here, so I'm sure requests and suggestions for useful ways to integrate the programs would be accepted with interest via Help->Send Feedback in the respective programs.