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I discovered something interesting (and annoying) about OmniOutliner this week while spending a great deal of time working there taking notes.
Normally, when you paste, the whole thing ends up in one blob and you have to manually fix the mess and turn the 'item' into individual outline entries. I've long hoped for a MORE like paste mode that would divide the data up into entries and save me the hassle. I've asked a couple times about it without ever being told anything. After accidently stumbling into how to do it, I think they decided that I was so stupid that it wasn't worth explaining (how could you not know this sort of thing).
So here's the deal...
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| Step 1 |
You are sitting in the editor, with an insertion point blinking somewhere and you have data that needs to be pasted and is already broken up into item sized chunks separated by linefeeds (or your local equivalent).
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| Step 2 |
Press enter (not return) in OmniOutliner which will select the entire item in the outline. Paste. That's it. Your data will automatically be broken up into multiple outline items. Now I wish that they'd see two linefeeds and figure I want an extra linefeed attached to the inside of the item, but this is a big step forward in usability for me.
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| Step 3 |
Notice that the data I pasted was added as an outline item. The outliner does recognize tabs during this paste process and will automatically deal with data which has already organized.
The reason I am annoyed (and have missed this until now) is because it is a modal behavior. When I accidently managed it earlier this week I ended up missing five minutes of notes as I failed to discover what I'd done accidently. When it happened again today I already knew everything I'd done previously to find the feature so it had to be related to something else... I repeated the previous behavior (deleting multiple lines of text which leaves you in a 'selection' mode). Voila!
Modality may not be a bug but it certainly is not a feature.
One last thing, pressing the left or right arrow will put you back in edit 'mode'.
Posted by Dave at February 12, 2004 08:54 PM