Fixing A Messy Outline

I want to clean up a messy outline.

It’s messy because text has been pasted as richtext maintaining how it was originally styled.

I also want to globally affect the styles of elements pertaining to it’s level.

To fix this map I need to know two things:

  1. How can I strip all formatting of the outline WITHOUT going in manually to remove text formatting inherited from the source it was pasted from?

  2. How can I globally effect the styles of elements pertaining to it’s level so “level 3” is “heading 3” etc?

How can I strip all formatting of the outline WITHOUT going in manually to remove text formatting inherited from the source it was pasted from?

The easiest way might be to re-paste the information using the Paste and Match Style command, rather than regular Paste. This ignores all formatting information on the pasteboard, which might mean that OmniOutliner interprets the hierarchy of the pasteboard data differently (because it has ignored paragraph indentation, for example).

How can I globally effect the styles of elements pertaining to it’s level so “level 3” is “heading 3” etc?

Select Level 3 Rows in the Styles pane of the sidebar. On the Style Inspector, click the Included Styles popup and choose the Heading 3 item. Now all styles affected by the Level 3 Rows style will implicitly carry the Heading 3 style.

As a shortcut, you can also drag the icon next to Heading 3 styles and drop it on Level 3 Rows. Both of these procedures work to associate level styles with named styles, as well as associating named styles with other named styles. (For example, you can have Heading 3 implicitly apply Emphasis, in case you want just one easily-changed emphasis style throughout your entire document.)

For #1 can you not select all affected rows and “clear style”? If that doesn’t work, apply one of the OO styles then try again.