Summing hours and minutes

I’d like to have a document where I can enter activity times in hours and minutes, and then have those summed in parents. I was able to create a date column and use a format of HH:MM, which works fine for activities, but for a summary, there is Maximum, but no Total. I can use a column type of Duration, but can’t format for hours and minutes (e.g., HH:MM) (it formats for percentage of an hour). It’s much easier for me to think in terms of (hours and) minutes, rather than (hours and) percentages of an hour. Just checking if I’m missing anything.

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Can’t get this to do right either.
To enter duration, you have to settle for Omni’s preferred (and somewhat ridiculous IMHO) method of displaying the info, as far as I can tell, though if you’d found a solution, please share?
If I type in 10m, OO displays it as “0.167.” My complaint is not that this is technically slightly inexact (even though it is) due to rounding. Nor is the problem isn’t that I’ll forget that"0.167h" means 10m .The problem is that like many or possibly almost all people who estimate and record time, I want to view 10 minutes as something more like “10 minutes” or “10m.” And if I share this outline with somebody, they’ll want to know why I recorded time in such a weird way. Some people might not even know off-hand that “.167” comes out to 10 minutes.
And the summary totals are also awkward/weird I’m estimating time I’ll likely spend on various projects for the day or week, and then I want to see the total estimate as the summary. The total estimate for today for all tasks today is, according to OO, “7.617h.” OK, I know to round, so that’s a little over 7 hours 30 minutes. But why can’t it I choose to show time in a way that reflects how I and most people normally read, write, and think about time? BTW, 7.617 is technically 7 hours 37 minutes and 2 seconds. I did NOT enter seconds into any of my tasks, but due to OO’s weird choices about what to round and what not to round, I get 4.617, which is both awkward to look at and, technically and precisely speaking, an inexact calculated total.

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I can’t believe, this is still an issue. Today I thought I’d give it another shot and use it to plan a timetable for a workshop. I aborted after a few minutes for that same reason: Fractions of an hour are useless for this task. For a tool that USPs are professional freedom, flexibility and ease of use, OmniOutliner forces you into idiosyncratic ways a little too often (the style “system” can be another headscratcher from time to time). Maybe in another two years time this will get some attention. Till that day I’ll do my planning in Numbers (which I find astonishingly appropriate for that task).

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July 2021 still the same issue. It just sucks. All I want to do is summing up all Numbers (Minutes) from one column. However the numbers are getting mixed up with parent and child tasks etc. Its just a mess I cannot understand.

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This is the first time I’ve used the Omni forums. I wanted to find out if there was any way to display durations in OmniOutline as anything other than hours and fractions of hours. I was delighted to see that the first two topics in the OO forum were about this topic. I then saw the date of the first item and realised that it’s been over six years and nothing has been done.

Hours and fractions of an hour may be fine for Project Management type tasks but are useless when planning a presentation. I know I can use a number column to record minutes but it is really, really, really annoying that it isn’t possible to display durations in a appropriate format. Even more annoying that nothing has been done to remedy the situation…

If you ever get around to fixing this annoyance then the other column types also need formatting options (I want to record 10 minutes not 10.00 minutes! Also dates.

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Alas, if you’re expecting active forums and also active improvement of the app, then OmniOutliner might not be the best choice. 😀

Apparently, telephone calls and emails are the preferred method for providing support. You’re more likely to get a response that way.

There’s good support from the Omni group, they always respond and help with problems, but as you elude to, wish they would give this great app the attention it deserves, it has such huge potential. Seems automation is always prioritised and so many little things like this have been in the forum for literally years…why let it stagnate?

Even the automation for OmniOutliner has stagnated. Automation features previewed over two years ago here in the forum were never were completed. Clearly the app has not been a priority for years now.

The forums are often helpful. However how new features are implemented to the app is through support E-Mail, because the support does not track the feedbacks in the forums.

Yes, I am aware of the decision to essentially kill what used to be a useful forum, with the rationale that email and telephone are more convenient for the developers.😀

Could it actually be that nobody has bothered to email or call? After all there have been no improvements to this premium-priced app for years.

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I will write once I texted the support.