I’m a graphic designer, and I have an online form where people within my organization can send me design requests. Fields within the form include things like “Project Name” “Due Date” along with a list of different formats they can check for different formats they might need the design in.
At the moment, I’ve set up this form to email results my Omnifocus Mail Drop address. This creates a single task in my inbox, with the results of the form in the “notes” section of the task.
This works fine, but I see so much automation that could be happening here based on the information that is already available in the notes section:
- Converting the single action to a project based on the Project Name
- Assigning the project a due date
- Parsing through the requested design formats to create additional action items (ie “Create 11x17 poster format of #ProjectName”
Any ideas on how to make even SOME of this possible.
Simple answer NO 😳
I have a similar setup, and presumably the forms are a standard format… What I do is create a “Meta Task” to set up a project then export the whole thing into Drafts (Taskpaper format, work on it and send it back to OF as a project. I have some templates in Drafts to help with this. You can probably do this with Mindnode as well if mind maps work better for you.
Hopefully Omni automation when it arrives in OF will actually allow this sort of stuff to be possible but at the moment I don’t think so.
It would be very helpful to have a native way to specify parameters when emailing the OmniFocus Mail Drop address. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to email the Omni Group with this request (omnifocus@omnigroup.com).
In the meantime, @joebuhlig wrote an AppleScript called Auto-Parser that may be helpful. it doesn’t specifically create projects, but can be used to populate fields (e.g. the due date) that will be preserved when you convert the action to a project (using Edit > Convert to Project).
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