This is likely obvious to the experts, but I couldn’t find the solution in the forum already.
I’ve been trying to replace Circus Ponies Notebook with OO. I’ve made enough progress that today I was taking meeting minutes with it. There’s a spreadsheet embedded in my outline, and I was editing both my outline (with OO) and the spreadsheet with excel. I opened the spreadsheet by clicking on the icon within my outline. When I tried to save my file, I got a message about having edited the file with an external editor. I edited the spreadsheet with excel, but did not edit the outline with anything other than OO. I saved the file and it threw away all my excel changes.
I’d be very grateful is someone could tell me the correct procedure for editing an embedded file.
Apple has some fairly strict security requirements (often called sandboxing) that are designed to make it hard for apps to misuse your data and file system. Sometimes this leads to issues with editing embedded files. When you click on the spreadsheet from inside your OmniOutliner document and make changes, Excel sees those edits as coming from outside of its sandbox and doesn’t trust them.
I’d say that attaching your Excel file as a linked file rather than as an embedded file could work, but we’ve been seeing issues with linked files as well. These sandboxing issues happen across our apps (see this thread for OmniFocus Attachments In OF2) - at least one person had success with setting up a linked file, moving their linked file to another location, then back again, and updating the link. It may be helpful for your case.
All that said, I’ve added your experience to the bug file so that the rest of the team knows you’ve run into this problem. Sorry that I don’t have a better fix for you - hopefully we’ll be able to address this in the future.
If anyone else happens upon this thread and would like their comments added to the open bug report on this, please send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com and include a link to this forum thread URL.
