OmniFocus provides a variety of quick and convenient features to help you search and filter your OmniFocus database.
OmniFocus 3 for Mac
Searching works essentially the same way in OmniFocus 3 for Mac as it did in OmniFocus 2 for Mac with a few key changes.
Clicking on the magnifying glass in the search bar now reveals three options. Search Here searches the current outline, Search Remaining searches everything that’s incomplete, and Search Everything searches the entire OmniFocus database, including items that have been marked complete.
The Find feature (accessed using Edit > Find > Find or ⌘F) now searches both the title field and the notes field.
The Quick Open button no longer appears in the toolbar by default. It can be added to the toolbar by choosing View > Customize Toolbar.
Custom perspectives are more powerful in OmniFocus 3. It’s still possible to create a Phone perspective in OmniFocus 3 for Mac (Pro), but the interface for creating this custom perspective has changed. Note that the search term (“Phone:” in this case) no longer appears in the search bar when you switch to this perspective.
Note that contexts are now called tags and OmniFocus 3 tasks can have multiple tags.
Once you’ve been using OmniFocus for a while, you may find that you build up quite an extensive database of projects, actions and groups. In this video we’ll walk through the variety of quick and convenient features that OmniFocus provides to help you search your OmniFocus database. Most of what we’ll cover will work on both the Standard and Pro editions of OmniFocus, though we we will take a look at a couple ways to search and filter the OmniFocus database that are avaiable exclusively to Pro users. You’ll learn:
- How to search the main outline using one or multiple search terms.
- How to search the entire database, or only a portion of the database.
- How to search for items in the OmniFocus Archive database.
- How to use the Find feature to find items in the main outline.
- How to use Quick Open to conveniently access perspectives, folders, projects and contexts.
- How to use the Focus feature in combination with the search and find features (Pro Edition).
- How to create a custom perspective that contains a search term (Pro Edition).