Searching omnifocus

Hi I’m trying to figure out how to make my searches more effective. There are times when I search omnifocus and it requires a lot of looking through big lists before i find what i’m looking for. Could anyone please offer advice?

Here are some questions:

  1. How can i search for everything, but make it show only available or remaining? When I use the search for everything function in the menu bar (or the search bar), it always shows me a bunch of completed tasks. It doesnt give me an option to change the view settings (the view icon is greyed out) and the sort by options in the menu bar dont seem to help.

  2. How can i search for names of projects (or folders)?

  3. Is it more effective to set up perspectives that do specific search functions than to use the in-box search functions? if so, what perspectives are helpful?

If you are using a recent version then there are search options available by clicking on the magnifying glass.
I suspect that you want search remaining.

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Thanks PhilRob! That solves the 1st question.

Any ideas about the second question? When I “search here” in the projects perspective, it searches the project names as well as tasks in the projects. Sometimes this makes it difficult to find a project by name, because it gets hidden below a bunch of other projects that just have tasks that include the search criteria.

Is there any way to just search for just project names (and/or folder names)? Or maybe a way to sort the search results to show the projects that have the project names with the search criteria before the ones with just tasks that meet the search criteria?

For your 2nd question: Have you tried using the “Quick Open” feature (i.e., from the “File” menu or using the keyboard shortcut “command-O”)? This will search for perspectives, projects, folders, and contexts and give you the option to open them up after searching.

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Thanks bryan, that keyboard shortcut is so great! Is there any way to sort the results that it provides in that search popup/window?

From what I can tell, OmniFocus automatically sorts the results both by relevancy (i.e., closer matches to your search appear higher in the list) and also by their order in the Projects list.

If you want a folder or project to appear above the rest in your search results, try moving it higher in the Projects list (by dragging it up the list in the sidebar) and see if that achieves the desired result.

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