How do you export an outline of actions to Omni Outliner

OmniFocus
#1

It seems like copy/paste and drag/drop won’t bring a hierarchy of OmniFocus action groups / actions over to Omni Outliner.

Is there a way to do this? All I need are the titles of the actions and for the hierarchy to be maintained.

As it is, I’m just manually copying and pasting each item since it’s not a long list, but it seems there must be a better way to do this.

1 Like
#2

you’re right. dragging and dropping doesn’t do much for me.

I’ve had to create a perspective showing the items I want. Then I go to

Menu > File > Export

Then save as a plain text file. I can open this plain text file in OmniOutliner to preserve the hierarchy.

#3

Hmm, both Copy/Paste and Drag/Drop are supposed to work between OmniFocus and OmniOutliner. Is this in the OmniFocus 3 test builds? Some of its pasteboard code was just reworked a few days ago, and may have inadvertently introduced a compatibility bug.

#4

Yes, it does look like a regression, but the OF 2 behavior does not seem quite right either.

Here’s what I’m seeing when I copy an action group and its actions to Omni Outliner:

Copying from OF 2:
If I am editing an outline item, text for the action group and its actions appears as the text of that single outline item

If I de-select so no outline item is being edited, a new outline item is added for each item, but the hierarchy is not preserved. The actions are all peers of the action group.

Copying from OF 3:
If I am editing an outline item, only text for the action group appears as the text of the selected outline item

If I de-select so no outline item is being edited, one new outline item is added for the action group.

So, it looks like there is a regression.

But the existing OF 2 -> OO behavior is not what I’d expect. (I’d expect the hierarchy to be preserved).

It was also hard to discover that you needed to deselect in order to get multiple items when you pasted, especially since a brand new OO document has the first item selected.

The workflow was that I realized an action group in Omni Focus was really a checklist, not a project. So I did something like:

  1. Select the items in OF
  2. Copy
  3. Open a new OO document
  4. Paste