Tasks internals

[bhutton]

I'm looking for information on Deja Tasks that would be in a User Guide if such existed (if there is one, please let me know how to find it).
1: Order within Priority: It often turns out that I have several tasks in the same category with the same priority. Since there are only 5 priority levels, it's often not possible to redistribute my tasks so that they appear in the order I want. Is there any way of ordering tasks which have the same priority? Or is there some other way to get the effect I want?
2: Duplicate Record: I guess it's a relatively new feature: I observe that when I hold my stylus on a task, a flag appears saying "Duplicate Record." and if I move the stylus and hold my mouth right, sometimes (not always) a copy of the original task will appear, and I can assign it a new priority, and maybe a new category. This can be quite useful if I know how to control it, but all I know about the feature is what I've observed by trial and error. Is any documentation available that can tell me exactly how this action works?
Thanks for whatever insight you can provide. [PS: I see my signature is out of date. My DejaOffice release is 1.5.8]

[Ben]

1: Order within Priority:

Use the Group By feature in conjunction with Sort By (these are both in Task Settings). For instance, you can group by priority, then sort by title, which should sort all tasks first by priority, and then alphabetically by subject.

2: Duplicate Record:

The "Duplicate Record" label is also a button. Once you see "Duplicate Record" appear, just tap directly on it and you should get a new, duplicate task.

[bhutton]

Ordering Tasks

Ordering within priority:
Thanks for the advice on "Duplicate Record." As for my ordering problem, I'm already using "Group By" to put tasks with the same due date together, which leaves only
"Group by Priority" to play with. And there seems to be no way to control the order in which tasks with the same priority appear. And that's the problem I'm looking for a solution to. . . . or am I approaching the whole thing from the wrong angle ??

[Ben]

Ah, ok. You want to use subject as tertiary sort, since you're grouping by due date and sorting by priority. We went ahead and added this to the next release of DejaOffice, version 1.6.1. Basically, if neither of your sort by or group by settings are using subject, we will automatically use subject as the tertiary sort (right now it looks like it just uses create date, which probably isn't too useful). This should solve the issue for you.

We expect to release version 1.6.1 within a week or so.

[bhutton]

OK, that sounds terrific!! I'm looking forward to it. Thanks.

[bhutton]

I entered this query several days ago, but it still hasn't appeared on the forum. Maybe it got sidetracked some way - ? My question was: WHAT HAS HAPPENED to the handling of Task priorities in Deja Office ???? I've used "sort by priority" routinely, and now it has NO effect! Also, the priority field has gone blank in many of my tasks. Even more puzzling, the display I see when I try to change priority is different: I used to be able to set priority only in the range of 1 to 5, but now I can put in anything I wish, alpha or numeric (I'd love that to be true if it would actually affect task order!) HELP!

[Ben]

bh - It sounds like you just have alpha (Franklin) style priorities turned on. To fix it, go to DejaTask Settings, then change the priority style to PalmOS Style.

[bhutton]

OKAY !!! That did the job! I don't even know what alpha (Franklin) means -- must have fat-fingered something. THANKS, Ben!
And now that I'm thinking of it, what would be wrong with allowing a priority to be 73, or ab, or anything within capacity limits? Sorting is sorting, isn't it? If I could do it that way, I wouldn't need a tertiary sort.
And on that subject, when is Version 1.6.1 due?

[Ben]

bhutton - Alright. I'm glad to hear that got things back to normal!

Alpha (Franklin) style is basically just free-form. I believe that any alpha-numeric characters should be usable.

DejaOffice 1.6.1 is up on the App Store now. It was just posted earlier this afternoon.