Perspective - Projects that contain tags tagged with 'xxx'

OmniFocus
#1

I’m scratching my head a bit and haven’t been able to find the answer after searching. I see that the question has been asked, but no one replied.

Is it possible to create a perspective that shows all projects that contain tasks tagged with (or without) ‘Tag A’? I’m thinking it’s not, but if someone could confirm it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

#2

If by this you mean displaying those projects and their entire contents, that’s not possible. Perspective rules always derive a set of actions which are then grouped and sorted in various ways.

What you could do is group the perspective by ‘Entire Projects’. The perspective hierarchy will include all the projects of the actions that match you criteria. This will give you at least the list of projects. Then you can either:

  • use the ‘Show in Projects’ command on each project to inspect the entire contents of each project individually;
  • ‘Select All’ in the outline and use the ‘Focus’ command, then switch to the Projects perspective.

If you must see everything together and want to do it automatically, then in OF for Mac you could create an Automation script which:

  1. gets the set of actions based on their tags
  2. gets the parent projects of those actions
  3. applies ‘Focus’ on those projects
  4. displays the Projects perspective.
#3

It’s not, but one workaround that you can sometimes use is to include a ‘tag’ of sorts in the name of the project, or in the project’s note. How you do this is up to you - one example from my own database is that I have a number of projects which have a ‘🌟’ emoji added to the name. Others, I believe, have used a hashtag-style tag in the project notes for a similar purpose.

Once added, you can add a ‘search results contain ____’ filter in a perspective’s rules to show all tasks that belong to those projects. (Or add a ‘Not’ rule to get those that don’t.)