OmniFocus to OmniOutliner

OmniFocus
1

Hey folks,
My OmniFocus has become a dumping ground for everything and I need to start fresh.
I was planning to export projects out of OmniFocus, and into OmniOutliner to clear our OF and have all the things that I’ve shoved out still accessible.

I can’t seem to find a way to do this.
I found a post referencing an old script that someone created, but that link doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

Has anyone ever moved things out this way, and can recommend a method?

Thanks

2

Depending on the format you want, try this:

  1. In the Projects perspective, make sure everything you want to export is visible (e.g., if you want to include completed items, make sure that the perspective is set to show them). If you want the Inbox and any folders you have created, make sure they are set to show in the outline (not only in the sidebar).
  2. Edit > Select All
  3. Edit > Copy as TaskPaper
  4. Switch to a text editor (I use BBEdit) and open a new document
  5. Edit > Paste
  6. Save the new document
  7. In OmniOutliner, open the text document and then save as an OmniOutliner doc.

The result is a hierarchical, collapsible outline organized by folder, project, and task.

It’s not perfect, in that carriage returns produce new top-level items, so if you have a lot of notes with carriage returns, you’ll have to do some cleanup. But it seems to work reasonably well.

Edited to correct the previous paragraph: I took a closer look and realized that TaskPaper export works fine with carriage returns in notes. It only fails when the carriage return is in a folder, project, or task name. Since the TaskPaper export format begins each line with a hyphen or a tab, except for blank lines (with only a return), you can find all extraneous carriage returns in the TaskPaper text file with the following grep expression:

^[^\-\t\r]

3

And a correction to my correction: it seems that carriage returns in notes will produce wonky output: every line after a carriage return will appear as a new task, not as part of the previous task’s note. So if you have a lot of carriage returns in notes, you may have to do some manual cleanup of those.

And of course this method won’t work with attachments, since the TaskPaper format is text-only; it will also lose any formatting in notes.