OmniOutliner-Users digest, Vol 1 #206 - 13 msgs

[Angus McIntyre]

At 7:46 +0000 10.01.2003, Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote:
>On onsdag, jan 8, 2003, at 21:01 Europe/Copenhagen, 
>omnioutliner-users-request at omnigroup.com wrote:
>
>>  One feature I very much like in Excel is the 'auto-filter': you get a
>>  menu at the top of a column that has one item for each unique entry
>>  in the column. When you choose an item, the spreadsheet is filtered ...
>
>Yes, I like this idea too, or a text-search box which filters in the same
>way that Mail filters messages.  But let's not forget that OO is an
>outliner.  How would you represent the hierarchical structure if you
>used this on a regular outline?

There are two possibilities that I can think of. One would be to show 
anything matching the filter, plus its ancestor nodes. The ancestor 
nodes could be 'ghosted' (shown in pale gray) so that the items 
matching the filter would stand out more.

The other would be to simply hide everything that didn't match the 
filter. The remaining items could be shown as a flat list, as someone 
suggested, or presented with indentation preserved, but without the 
ancestor items shown.

I suspect that the first approach might be easier to implement. One 
possible nice feature of this is that calculated summaries could be 
updated according to what was shown (the OmniOutliner developers are 
now writhing in pain at the thought). In other words, if you have:

   Description                           Category       Amount
   -----------                           --------       ------
   Expenditure                                          12700.00
     Jan 2003                                           12700.00
        6 polled Herefords               livestock      10000.00
        1 smallish RPG                   firearms         400.00
        2 llamas (semi-tame)             livestock       2000.00
        500ct 5.56mm ammo                firearms         300.00

this would change to:

   Description                           Category       Amount
   -----------                           [livestock]    ------
   Expenditure                                          12000.00
     Jan 2003                                           12000.00
        6 polled Herefords               livestock      10000.00
        2 llamas (semi-tame)             livestock       2000.00

when filtered.

This might be getting rather far from the purpose of an outliner, 
although this kind of feature could be useful in other applications 
(project planning, where you could see at a glance how much time is 
required to implement specific subparts?). I wouldn't want to 
encourage the OO team to stray from their core objectives, but I see 
an outliner as a general tool for thinking, and there's probably room 
for adding a few neat features - which could lead to the software 
being used in ways its makers never dreamed of - without getting too 
far off track.

	Angus
-- 
angus at pobox.com                             http://pobox.com/~angus