Guided Tour

Getting to know OmniFocus by navigating through its various bits and pieces is a great way to start working with the app. The following overview will help you get things going.

Sidebar (Home Screen)

The sidebar (or home screen, on iPhone) acts as the central hub of the hive of your OmniFocus activity. With badge icons displaying a count of your most important actions, you’ll see what’s on your plate for the day and week ahead.

Use the sidebar to navigate between perspectives in the main outline. When in landscape mode on iPad the sidebar is always shown; when in portrait, show the sidebar by swiping in from the left (swipe to the right to hide it), or use the chevron in the upper left of the toolbar.

On iPhone, navigate to the home screen by following the chevron back from whatever view you're in (or press and hold it to return home in an instant). On iPhone 6 Plus, landscape mode displays the sidebar by default; tap Expand to dismiss it, and the chevron to bring it back.

Note
With the OmniFocus Pro in-app purchase installed, tapping the edit button in the secret bar brings you to the tile editor, where you can rearrange, add, and remove perspectives from your favorites. Learn more about perspectives in the Perspectives chapter.

  • Forecast

Tap Forecast to enter forecast view, where tasks for the day are shown alongside any calendars you’ve chosen to display. The badge icon in the sidebar or home screen counts the number of tasks currently overdue.

  • Inbox

Tap Inbox to view and process items collected in your inbox.

  • Projects

Tap Projects to view a list of your projects, and estimate their urgency using the handy summary dots beneath each project title.

  • Contexts

Tap Contexts to view a list of your contexts, and likewise get an at-a-glance appraisal of each from the summary dots.

  • Flagged

Tap Flagged to see a list of items you’ve flagged for visibility. The number of flagged items is shown in the badge icon in the sidebar.

  • Nearby

If you’ve assigned locations to your contexts, tap Nearby to view the available actions near your location.

  • Review

Tap Review for a periodic organized check up on the progress of your projects – easily assess the status of projects one at a time, mark items complete or on hold, and adjust them as circumstances change.

Secret Bar

Whenever you're "home" — viewing the list of perspectives in the OmniFocus sidebar or home screen — drag down on the list to reveal the secret bar. The secret bar holds tools of great power, but relatively infrequent use; that’s why they’re safely kept out of the way for just when you need them.

  • Sync

Tap Sync to trigger a sync manually. This is useful any time you want to update OmniFocus on your other devices, or make sure your device is up to date with your remote database.

Note
OmniFocus syncs automatically whenever changes are made, so you shouldn't have to do this very often (if ever).

  • Settings

Tap Settings to customize your OmniFocus experience, contact Omni Support, access the help, and more. Read about the available options in detail in the Settings chapter.

  • Search (iPhone)

Tap Search to filter your OmniFocus database (titles and notes) using terms you select. You can choose to receive results from your current location only (when browsing away from the home screen), to search in remaining items only (everything that isn't completed or dropped), or search your entire database.

On iPad, Search is found in the toolbar.

  • New Perspective (Pro)

With the OmniFocus Pro upgrade installed, tap New Perspective to create a new custom perspective. To change the view settings of a currently existing perspective, go to the perspective and drag down to reveal its secret bar, then tap View . The icon changes to when editing a custom perspective.

  • Default and All Perspectives

Use this switch to choose the set of perspectives that appear in the sidebar. Default displays the seven built-in perspectives, while All Perspectives reveals Completed and Changed as well. With the Pro upgrade installed Default becomes Favorites, a space that's fully customizable using the Tile Editor.

  • Tile Editor (Pro)

In OmniFocus Pro, tap this button to enter tile editing mode. Completely customize the appearance of your sidebar or home screen by touching and dragging perspective tiles into the desired full- and half-width rows (existing perspectives will kindly get out of your way), or drag them down to the Other Perspectives section to indicate that they aren't part of your favorites.

Tap Done — or anywhere else on the screen — to confirm your layout change, or tap Cancel to exit tile editing without saving your changes.

Toolbar

When viewing the main outline with your device in landscape orientation, or in portrait with the sidebar hidden, the toolbar at the top of the screen is fully visible. Here you’ll access several important functions, described below:

  • Edit

Tap Edit to delete and rearrange items in the main outline using the deletion switch and reordering handles that appear. On iPad, edit mode is a particularly good way to move items between projects – just drag an action’s reordering handle until it’s within the desired project, group, or folder.

  • Undo (iPad)

Tap Undo to revert the latest change made to your database. This is the easiest way to restore an accidentally completed or deleted item, or revert a change made while editing. To redo an undid change, just tap and hold Undo.

On iPhone, shake your device to undo an unwanted change.

  • Search (iPad)

Filter title text and note field contents for search terms across three useful scopes: Here, which includes everything visible in the main outline; Remaining, which includes all items not completed or dropped; or Everything, which accesses your entire database.

On iPhone, Search is found in the Secret Bar.

  • View

Choose your view options for the current perspective here, setting the parameters for items to be displayed based on the status you’ve given them.

  • Add New…

Based on your current view in the main outline, you’ll see options for adding new items. When you’re at the top level of a perspective, typically this will give you the broadest option possible (a new project or a new context at the top level), otherwise the options presented will be more granular.

  • New Inbox Item (iPad)

Formerly known as Quick Entry, this button lets you add a new task to your inbox from virtually anywhere in the app.

On iPhone, the New Inbox Item button is found in the lower right of the Home and perspectives screens.

Main Outline

This is where you’ll view, add, and manipulate the tasks you’re working on at a given moment. What you see here is based on which perspective you’re viewing, what you have selected in the sidebar (or where you've navigated from the home screen), and more—you can narrow your concentration on just a few things you’d like to accomplish in the near term, or get a broad overview of the tasks ahead across a number of projects.

The main outline displays a list of items—inbox items, projects, actions, or groups—that fit the criteria you’ve established with your other view parameters. Each item displays associated information that’s the most relevant info you’ve entered about it.

To delete an item in the main outline, touch and drag from right to left until the Delete button appears. This removes the item from your database entirely; to mark it complete instead, just tap its status circle.

How Items Are Ordered
Actions, projects, and other items in the main outline are ordered based on the sequence in which you entered them, or how you’ve manually arranged them in edit mode, with a couple of exceptions: when you’re in a context-based view with a different sort priority set, or in Forecast, where items are sorted by due date and time.

Other sorting parameters can also be applied with custom perspectives when the Pro upgrade is installed.

Editor

To delve deeper into the details of a task, just tap its name. The main outline makes way for the editor, where you can flesh out the task at hand with additional bits of info like when it’s due for completion, whether it’s part of a larger project, how long it’ll take, whether (and how) it repeats, and more. Enrich an item further with a text note and add audio and image attachments, all from tabs within the editor.

Note
The editors for inbox items, actions, and projects are pretty similar, since these all represent tasks that can be accomplished. The editor for contexts is special because it represents a person, place, or thing that you need to help accomplish a goal; importantly, the context editor is where you give a context a location so it can be tracked from the Nearby screen.

Ways that inbox items, actions, projects, and contexts can be enriched using the editor are explored in their individual chapters.

Editor Tools

When using the editor on iPad, a new set of commands becomes available at the top of the screen (replacing the toolbar that’s visible when you’re viewing the main outline). On iPhone, these same tools appear in rows at the bottom of the editor's Info pane.

  • Move

Tap to create nesting hierarchy of items within the inbox; actions within projects; or contexts within other contexts.

  • Convert

When editing an inbox item or an action, tap to convert it to a project. When editing a project, tap to convert it to an action (the action will appear in the “Miscellaneous” project).

  • Share

Tap to send the current selection as a message, an email, or via any other service that shares with OmniFocus.

  • Delete

Tap to remove the edited item from your OmniFocus database entirely.