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 " content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> The Entourage User's WebLog
Jun 2006
The Entourage User's WebLog | Jul 2006 | May 2006
Getting at the Address Book
2006-06-14 • Reviews • Permalink
The Entourage address book is a great part of the programme. It is powerful, flexible and well integrated with the rest of the Office suite. However, switching to the address book view and looking for a name, or even having to fire up Entourage when you want to find an address can be a pain. Fortunately, there's an easier way!

Jonathan Nathan has written a great little utility called "Entourage AB Menu" that puts a little purple 'e' icon in the menu bar.
menu_main
Select this icon and you get a list of all your address book contacts, selectable by name, by category, by company, by geographical area etc. By drilling down these hierarchical menus (which work very quickly) you can select the contact you want.

Here stuff gets even more fancy, in the preferences, you can decide what happens when you select each type of data. By default, select the name and the contact opens in Entourage for editing; select the address and it is copied to the clipboard; select the phone number and it is dialled through the speaker etc.

There's lots of control over what the utility does, through the preferences window. In fact, there are so many options that the preferences window looks cluttered and a little overwhelming at first, but take your time and look through all the options one by one.

Installation is easy. Just download the disk image, then drag the application to your Applications folder (or anywhere else, come to that) and double-click it to make it run. Because its an application, there is no great interference with the OS and it appears to be rock-solid stable. First time you run it you get to set the prefs which includes an option to start the utility when you log in. EntourageABmenu is $10 shareware, but you get to use all the functions in an unregistered version for up to 30 minutes at a time - when the 30 minutes expires you can launch it again.


Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.
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Office under Rosetta
2006-06-14 • Reviews • Permalink
There have been a few questions about how well the Office suite runs under Rosetta on an Intel based mac.

Well, MacTech have published the results of a benchmark exercise comparing performance on a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz, a MacBook Pro 1.83GHz and a 20" iMac 2.0GHx Core Duo.

The good news is that, while there is a small performance hit, it's nothing serious.

Entourage is least affected (in fact, the iMac performed better than the PowerBook!), powerpoint most affected and word & excel about the middle.

The full report is here.


Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.
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Office 2004 Update 11.2.4
2006-06-14 • Reviews • Permalink
Earlier today Microsoft released update 11.2.4 for the Office Suite. It is available from either AutoUpdate (use 'Check for updates under the help menu) or as a separate download.

The only two applications to get updated are Powerpoint and Entourage - there is no change to Word or Excel (and, in fact, their version numbers remain at 11.2.3).

The update is billed primarily as a security update (full details available here), but a couple of other bug fixes are included, notably improvements to the handling of EPS graphics that could, in some cases, cause crashes or corruption. Also some documents that used German language will also now open correctly.

Before you rush in to install this update (a 54mb download - its a combo updater that includes several earlier updates as well), if you are using an Exchange account, make sure you read this KB article - there are some fairly rare circumstances where updating could cause data loss, but there is a pretty easy work-round to make it all safe.

Most important fix for Entourage users is that the complaint that some calendar items are not showing up in the entourage calendar (yet do when viewing the same account in Outlook) may be a thing of the past! This update is supposed to cure this issue. I'll check when I get back to work tomorrow and report any problems I find Happy

The other Entourage fix is a crash that sometimes occurred when connecting to LDAP servers over SSL. Not a problem that I ever encountered, so I will probably be unable to comment on how good this fix is.

Now for the bad news - what's not in there! I blogged a little while ago about the 'time zone bug' that appeared in Entourage after an Apple update for the changes to the DST rules in several parts of the world. I said at the time that this was no big issue because it was a strictly cosmetic bug. Well, it seems that for people who synced their calendars to iCal AND to some external PDA/phones, it caused replication of events, shifting events by an hour, or even caused events to be deleted from their devices. Bad news, indeed. The worse news is that this bug hasn't been fixed in this release. Come on Microsoft, why not?

Happy downloading!


Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.


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Want to help?
2006-06-12 • General • Permalink
The Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) at Microsoft are setting about redesigning the Mactopia web site. If you want to help in this process, take a look at this web page and spend 5 minutes or so classifying various topics that may (or may not) appear on the new web site.

It's a simple little 'usability' task that will allow them to arrange the web site so that most people will find the things they want easy to get at. There's no real reward for doing it, other than a nice warm fuzzy feeling that you could be helping your fellow mac users Happy
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Update 2006-06-13 13:30

It seems that there has been such a response that the survey is now closed as they got all the help they needed!

Quicker than I expected, but so it goes!
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Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.
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