[steinitz]

Hello,

I've been an outliner user for two decades. I've gotten into habits, good or bad. One bad habit is sometimes not making a clear distinction between a task and its associated information. For example, for a task 'partition new hard disk', the partitioning sizes should probably be kept separately to be reused for subsequent partitionings. Similarly for the task: 'configure new router'.

To keep things pure in OmniFocus, one should probably just have tasks -- putting each task's associated information elsewhere, like, say, in OmniOutliner.

My problem with that is that I don't know how to reference a specific row in OmniOutliner from OmniFocus. Sure, I could have thousands of OmniOutliner files -- one for each microscopic piece of information that I want to keep and have uber-outlines to organize it all. Then OmniFocus tasks could reference those tiny files.

Is there a better way?

OmniFocus notes don't really solve the problem because, more often than not, the information assiciated with a task is complex and unwieldy and requires the power of an outliner to tame it. Now if the notes themselves were an outline, then we'd have something.

On the other hand, perhaps one could create an 'information' context in OmniFocus. (I can hear the groans.)

I confess that this is not really an OmniFocus issue. Even OmniOutliner itself can't reference specific rows. Its an old problem, but maybe now, with outliners and GTD tools taking center stage, one that has a more pressing need for a solution.

Thanks for any insights,

Steve

[jasong]

I use Journler for this. You can drag an entry from Journler to OmniFocus, and it shows up as a link back to the Journler entry. I'm sure other applications which are meant for keeping notes and information have the same thing.

[steinitz]

Hi Jasong,

Thanks for your reply.

Originally Posted by jasong

I'm sure other applications which are meant for keeping notes and information have the same thing.

Well, yes. I didn't want to make too fine a point that OmniOutliner is one of the few that don't support it.

Steve

[Lizard]

OmniPlan has a URL format for creating links to specific items in a project, not just the whole file. I bet it would be easy to pull that feature over to OmniOutliner. I'll file a feature for that.

[santra]

Wow, this is amazing. What other programs/infobytes does this work with, I wonder...

Originally Posted by jasong

I use Journler for this. You can drag an entry from Journler to OmniFocus, and it shows up as a link back to the Journler entry. I'm sure other applications which are meant for keeping notes and information have the same thing.

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by Lizard

OmniPlan has a URL format for creating links to specific items in a project, not just the whole file. I bet it would be easy to pull that feature over to OmniOutliner. I'll file a feature for that.

Actually, we wanted to do internal linking for OmniOutliner before now (bug #2157), but it's not as easy as one might think, and it lost out to higher priorities. It's pretty high on our list of future priorities, often requested by users, and we would certainly like to get it in OO4. But please don't think it's easy. :-)

-andrew

I'm glad you're working on it.

I organized my holiday cookie making using OF, and realized that it would be a very good thing to keep my recipes in, but as it is now, not worth the effort for all of my recipes.

I kept ingredients as a note in the project, and then the steps as actions. I made this whole recipe a subproject of my cookie making project for '07 which featured related non-recipe tasks, such as shopping lists and lists of who got what which are all '07 specific, but the recipes don't really belong here. They belong in a folder for recipes with just a link in the project.

[steinitz]

Originally Posted by Lizard

OmniPlan has a URL format for creating links to specific items in a project, not just the whole file. I bet it would be easy to pull that feature over to OmniOutliner. I'll file a feature for that.

I downloaded OmniPlan to test that. I wasn't able to create a link from OmniFocus to an OmniPlan item. (I used the OmniOutliner technique of pressing the control key just before dropping it). Can someone confirm that that is correct?

That was after downloading 10 outliners and trying the same thing with all of them. None of them could do it. I also tried it with Journaler, per jasong's post. Journaler is the only program I found that could drag a reference to an individual items into OmniFocus. Disappointingly, it didn't work for Journaler Groups.

So, as far as I could see, there is currently no way to drag a reference to part of an outline tree into OmniFocus. I guess I'll have to wait to see if the feature appears on OmniOutliner 4. Andrew's post, though realistic, was encouraging.

On a side note, I made the pleasant discovery that the outliner 'Tao' supports the idea of an alias to part of a tree, but only within itself. Tao calls that a 'clone' -- a misnomer perhaps, but a cool feature that works just as expected.

Steve

[Lizard]

Sorry I wasn't clearer on this the first time around. It's not a drag-n-drop operation to put a link to a Plan task into Focus. If you right-click a task in OmniPlan, you'll get a menu, including the option "Copy as Link". Then you can paste that into OmniFocus (or most anywhere else).

Originally Posted by Lizard

If you right-click a task in OmniPlan, you'll get a menu, including the option "Copy as Link".

Not seeing this in the released build of OP (1.1/1.1.2-final-v131.9)

Am I missing sth. ?