UPDATE: never mind. I was only using omnioutliner for this because I had come to dislike omnifocus. But while I was on the site, I noticed the new omnifocus was available, so I snagged it. It’s really much better, so it would be a mistake to use omnioutliner for what I am trying to do. Although I suppose I’d still be curious about the questions I asked, if there is a concise answer to them somewhere.
I’m setting up an outline for work needed to do some equipment upgrades in my lab. I want to have a duration column for individual chunks of work, so I can get an idea of how long various higher-level chunks will take. At this point, the outline has three levels, but this could increase as I continue to plan. Logically, only terminal nodes (rows with no subrows) would have a fixed duration; parent (and grand…parent) nodes’ durations should be the recursive sum of lower elements.
But when I tried to make this happen, it didn’t, so I RTFM. It appears that ordinary parent nodes don’t get sums, only parents of groups. So before I go on with this, I’d like to know two things I couldn’t find in the manual: (1) Can you convert a top-level ordinary parent into a group (i.e., using the ordinary parent node as the parent of a new group)? I believe that this would be the reverse of what happens when you ungroup. (2) Can you have subgroups? I.e., can a duration column in a level 2 row be filled with the sum of its level 3 subrows, by somehow using the group feature? It would seem that this would have to be true if the summarizing process is to be recursive in any useful sense of the term.
Thanks.
