Tried Todoist import. Gave up

OmniFocus
#1

Have to say - I think OmniFocus should really consider creating a quick importer for OF. Especially from popular apps like Todoist, Things and a simple CSV format.

I wanted to come back to OF after taking a couple of years off and exploring other apps (currently on Todoist). I was on the signup page and ready to provide my credit card for the latest OmniFocus Mac app, iPhone app and iPad app.

However, I tried to do an import from OmniOuliner and was unsuccessful. I researched for a couple of hours but couldn’t find anything that would work unless I wanted to just copy and paste each and every task.

I know OF has stated in these forums that it has never come up as a major user request on the wish list. But, I would contest that it will “never” really come up as a wish list user for existing users. This is only hurting users that are wanting to try out OmniFocus and wanting to move their existing tasks over to your system. Existing users will never need this feature since they are already on the platform.

I want OmniFocus to be successful in the long run. But, this is a relatively easy feature to implement (I say “relatively” because that is compared to many other more complicated features) and this is desperately needed to propel OF into the forefront so users are able to really give it a “shot”.

I am someone who will provide feedback and have actually given it a good amount of time today to attempt to switch over. But, once I was able to see that Things app had an importer, Todoist has an importer, and just about all the other apps out there in this space has some sort of way to import tasks from another system, I decided to write this post to (hopefully) convince the developers to take another look at this. As well as to encourage the existing users - if you want OF to make it in the long run, go vote for this feature like crazy. You won’t be voting for a new feature for yourselves. You will be voting for the longevity of your favorite tasks app.

Hope this feedback helps! :)

3 Likes
#2

If there were CSV export/import that would cover your use case and others besides. Of course it would require marshalling eg Todoist’s data to / from that format.

I would want import to merge, avoiding duplicate tasks.

#4

What was the problem when you tried to import from Omnioutliner? It worked for me with a csv document (not exported from Todoist, though) that I saved as a tab delimited text document. I didn’t get the due dates correctly imported, but my guess is that that was som mismatch between my Swedish date format and the date format in Omnifocus import feature.

#5

That was it. No Dates matching, no projects, links inline with the task name (no way of automatically placing them in the notes or truncating to a nicer style link like Todoist does) not really anything. I will probably wait until Omnifocus updates their iPhone app to see what they do with that before trying to switch over again. I really miss defer dates, the OF reviews, etc. But, OF is starting to feel pretty dated compared to other task apps now. Although, I still love it and miss it often.

2 Likes
#6

I won’t comment in this thread on the freshness of the interface and would like to concentrate on the CSV export and import into OmniFocus…

… Is it a case of the CSV needing massaging before importing into OmniFocus? Or something else?

1 Like
#7

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