MLO behavior and feature issues and questions

[Tzal]

I've been using MLO for 48 hours and it's great! I've been able to
merge data from three productivity applications into MLO. I did find
an oddity:

A new task is created, and "Lock Period" is checked. If I set the due
date by right clicking in the due date column, only due date gets
set. If I set due date using the "Timing and Reminder" section in
properties, both due date and start date get set.

I have a few questions too. As you can see, I've jumped right in to
using MLO!

Is there a setting to have MLO compute parent due dates based on
the children, rather than have independent due dates? this especially
makes sense if the parent is a folder. Bonsai has this option.

Is there a setting to have MLO convert a task to a folder when a
child task is added? My parent nodes are never active tasks, so it
would be great to not have to manually convert them each time.

Is there a setting or settings to define defaults for a new task
(like due date = today, context = xxx, etc.)

Is there a setting to have a task with neither a start date or due
date be inactive? I'm having to set start dates in the future just so
tasks are not active.

Is there a setting to remove start date as an option? I don't
need two dates (start and due), and it's tedious having to deal with
both of them.

[pottster]

Hi,

Good choice! MLO is great.

Thanks for your first point.

A new task is created, and "Lock Period" is checked.  If I set the due 
date by right clicking in the due date column, only due date gets 
set.  If I set due date using the "Timing and Reminder" section in 

properties, both due date and start date get set.

I've raised this anomaly before with Andrey. It's actually quite dangerous as, depending on filters applied, tasks dated via right click can go unexpectedly "missing". I've failed on a couple of tasks in the past because of this.

The rest of the points you raise are well considered. I'll let others comment.

[Peter B]

I'm also new to MLO but behind you in getting to grips with the
detail. I don't know the answers but they're great questions which I
too would love to know the answers to. Do you use MLO on a smartphone
too? I have some issues with iphone (especially around task sort
procedures) which I've raised with MLO but I'd be interested to learn
if others are having problems too.

[Dan Nord]

I'm very interested in three of the features that Tzal requested a couple of years back:

-    A setting to have folder due dates set to the earliest due dates of the children, rather than have independent due dates?  (This is really important, because it would be nice to keep folders collapsed to avoid the clutter.  But not if you lose visibility to the due dates of the tasks that they contain!)

-    A setting to convert tasks into folders when child tasks are added?

-    A setting to remove start date as an option?

(It sounds like he and I are trying to use folders in the same way.)

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, Dan. The suggestions made by Tzal were made over four years ago. There has not been any followup since then, so I feel pretty safe in saying that these changes are not on anyone's schedule.

You can pursue them if you want. But you should be aware that it takes a long time to get a user-initiated change into MLO. Meanwhile, users on this forum may be able to help you find a workaround.

Let's start with the request for an option to eliminate the start date. Could you please explain why you need this? If you don't want to specify a start date, you could just leave it blank. If you don’t want to see the start date column in your view, just remove the column. Is there something different that you are trying to do? Let us know if you would like step-by-step directions for any of my suggestions.