The Entourage User's WebLog

So, you noticed those ads appearing in the sidebar?

There's no sinister reason behind it, I'm just testing things out. I need to justify the amount of time I spend on this site, in answering direct mail that comes to me from visitors to the site and on my support work in the newsgroups. Google AdSense is supposed present some discreet ads to goods or services based on the content of the page they are displayed on. I get a (very small) payout for any ads that are clicked on. In a few months time, I may get a cheque from Google, if enough people are interested in the ads' content. Any money received will go towards supporting this site (it is getting to the point where I am goign to have to move it off the dot mac servers to a dedicated site of its own) and the other free support work I do.

The ads are intended to be non-intrusive, they are promised to be non-offensive. If you have any comments or feedback to make about them, let me know. I'll be tweaking the display and content over the next few weeks. If I decide I don't like them they'll be dissapearing all together.

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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.

Scriptability is one of the great features of Entourage. It allows every user to make Entourage work in ways they want it to and to add new features, without causing th eapplication to become bloated beyond all use and sense. But, the average user doesn't use any scripts, which is a great shame because they are missing out on so many adbantages. All too often, when a script solution is proposed on the newsgroups, the person with the problem responds with words to the effect "I'm a complete novice with scripts, and I don't understand what to do..."

Well, here's hoping that this article will explain how to get scripts, install then and use them in a way that is clear enough for users of all abilities.

First, catch your script...

(With apologies to Mrs Glass)

Before you can use a script, you need to have one. There's three basic ways to catch your script.

You could download one. There are some good places for scripts. I have a few of mine here, there are many more at the ScriptBuilders web site. There are scripts providing all kinds of additional functionality available. Take a while to see if there is anything there to suit your needs. If you download a script frm either of these places it will most likely be in the form of a 'Compiled Script' - this is a file format that is useable directly by Entourage.

Or, you could ask on the newsgroup or mailing list. There are some experts hanging out in those places, and if a script solution is most applicable, they will either point one out to you, or may write one and post it in reply. These scripts will be in text form, usually pasted into the body of the message. This will need to be 'compiled' before it can be used. More on that later.

Finally, you could write your own! This isn't as difficult as it sounds. There are plenty of resources available, either on the web or in book form. If (when?) you get stuck, you can ask on the newsgroups mentioned earlier - there are always people there willing to help out.

So, let's assume you have caught your script now, and move n to steo two...

Step Two - Compiling...

If you have downloaded a script, and in the Finder it is described as "Compiled OSA Script (Data Fork)" then all is well, you can skip this step.

Otherwise, lets assume that you have copied the script from an email message. Lets pretend that this is the script you found (it will permanently delete selected messages without leaving them in the Deleted Items mail folder):

tell app "microsoft entourage"
set theMessages to current messages
delete themessages
try
delete themessages
end
end

You now need to make a script from it. First open up "Script Editor" - this is the application that Apple provides for writing, compiling and saving scripts. Find it in the "Applescript" folder of your "Applications" folder. Script Editor should start up with a new empty window. Copy the lines containing the script and paste them into the script window. Click on the 'Compile' button and the script should become nicely formatted like this:

It is possible that the Script Editor will throw an error at this stage - maybe because the original writer made a syntax error, but more likely because the mail client or list server put a line break into the script. The part of the script throwing the error will be highlighted in the script window and it is usually fairly obvious where the line break has occurred - just remove the line break and re-compile. Occasionally, the line break will occur at a point where it doesn't immediately throw an error, and the highlighted text may be on the line below the real error - again, this is usually fairly easy to spot, just by reading the script. Don't worry, you'll very quickly get used to spotting these errors in supplied scripts, even if you can't write your own scripts!

Saving The Script

Having successfully compiled the script, you now need to save it. The best place to put it is in Entourage's special scripts folder. In the script Editor window, select 'Save' (or 'Save As...') from the file menu. Type in a suitable name for the script (I used "Full Delete for this example). The 'File Format' drop down should default to "script" which is what you want. Leave all the other options alone, like this example:

Now, navigate first to your 'Documents' folder, then to the 'Microsoft User Data' folder, then to a folder in there called 'Entourage Script Menu Items' and click the 'Save' button.

If you got things right, the script is saved as a 'Compiled Script' and will appear in Entourage's Script menu (the little black 'scroll' icon just to the right of the 'Help' menu) as shown in the partial screen shot here. This script can then be easily accessed at any time directly from within Entourage, without having to resort to the Script Editor application ever again! You can now quit Script Editor, and we'll move on to the next section, how to use the script.

Running the script

In its simplest form, you can just run the script by selecting it from the script menu as I described above. But, there are other options. The example I used needs you to select some messages first, then run the script (and they will be permanently removed form Entourage, so select some messages you don't want any more if you intend to try the script!). But, there are other options...

You can, if the script is a suitable one, set up a schedule to run a script automatically at some predefined time. Use of schedules is fairly straightforward, select 'Schedules' from the Tools menu, click on the 'new' button and explore the timing options under the 'When' section. In the 'Action' section, you can set the schedule to 'Run AppleScript', as in this example:

When you click the 'Script...' button, you can select any script on your system, it doesn't have to be in the Script Menu Items folder, but this is still the best place to put scripts as they can then also be run manually.

In a similar manner, you can set a script to run as the action to a rule. For example, with the sample script just created and saved earlier, you could set up a rule to permanently delete any messages from a particular sender that you no longer want anything to do with. Simply set up your selection criteria to match whatever messages you want to kill, and set the rule action to run the script. You'll never see the messages again, they'll be completely deleted as they arrive!

They're the three basic methods to run a script in Entourage, but there's more...

Using Keyboard Commands

Once a script is in the Script Menu Items folder, you can easily assign it a keyboard shortcut. Go back to the partial screen shot of the Entourage Script Menu earlier in this article - notice how 'Insert Firefox URLs' and 'Insert Notes' have keyboard commands next to them? These scripts can be called with a keyboard command, just like many other menu items (Command-Control-U and Command-Control-N in these cases). Assigning keyboard commands is easy. You just use a particular 'code' at the end of the script name when you save it to define the keyboard command. In the case of 'Insert Firefox URLs', the script was saved with the name "Insert Firefox URLs v1.0\cmU.scpt" Entourage ignores the '.scpt' extension anyway - that will never appear in the Entourage menu. Then, Entourage uses the '\cmU' at the end of the name proper to define the keyboard shortcut. the '\' declares the existence of the shortcut. the 'c' defines the Control Key modifier, the 'm' the Command Key modifier and the 'U' the actual key to use with the modifier. So, '\cmU' is understood by Entourage to mean Control-Command-U, and that symbol is put in the script menu to the right of the script name. The modifiers you can use in this way (either singly, or in combination) are:

• \c - Control Key
• \m - Command Key
• \o - Option Key
• \s - Shift Key

So, you can now change the name of our example script to "Full Delete\csF.scpt" in the Finder. Next time you select the Script menu in Entourage, you will see the symbols for Control-Shift-F have been added to the script's name in the list. The Full Delete script can now be run just by selecting some messages and hitting Control-Shift-F. Easy.

Just one warning with keyboard shortcuts - if you happen to define one that is used elsewhere in Entourage, the script will over-ride the 'standard' shortcut. So, if you defined a script to use Command-R, for example, the script would run just fine with this command, but you could never again use Command-R to reply to a message! For this reason, I tend to use the Control key in all my script keyboard shortcuts - the Control key isn't used by the system or the Entourage application for keyboard shortcuts, so you're pretty safe from conflicts.

There's more information on using keyboard shortcuts at the Entourage Help Page web site here.

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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.

Don't get me wrong, I love Entourage, but I'm getting frustrated.

It seems to me that Entourage is accumulating lots of little niggles. Nothing big enough, on its own, to cause tne to questio why I use Entourage, but the accumulation of them is driving me nuts!

Here's my list of current pet peeves:

Entourage Hangs

At odd moments through the day, Entourage freezes up. This can last from a few seconds to about 10 minutes. I start doing something and the beach ball comes up. And stays up. Nothing responds, nothing happens. Other apps work just fine, Activity Monitor shows the Daemon & Application running normally and consuming very little processor capacity. This is particularly noticeable about 3 minutes after starting Entourage up, but it can happen at any time through the day. I haven't been able to pin down any reproducible steps, but when I do, you can be sure I'll use the 'Send Feedback' link under the Help menu!

Very slow to open Complex HTML

It's frustrating to have to wait 5 or 6 seconds for a mail to be displayed after you select it. This applies to those 'newsletter' type of emails mostly, but I'm also on a couple of Yahoo Group mailing lists, and they have now started sending complex HTML and their messages display the same annoying delays. The same mails in Mail.App and Eudora open almost instantly - why does Entourage have to be the poor relation?

'Download Pictures' gets lost

I have the option to download linked images in emails turned off by default. So, if I get a mail where I do want to see the images, I have to click on 'Download Pictures'. No problem so far, I like the ability to pick & choose which images get downloaded. However, a small percentage of messages loose this link. Most frustratingly it happens to messages where I have previously downloaded images, but when I go back to that message the images have disappeared and so has the Download link. There seems to be no way to get the pictures back. Again, this doesn't happen every time, but often enough to get my goat.

Too Slow Searching

v11.2.5 brought in Spotlight searching, which is fast, but coarse. By this, I mean that I can't limit my searches to a particular folder (or set of folders), or limit by date range or anything like that. Eudora has lightning fast searches - it can scan through half a million messages in about 4 seconds. Entourage takes about 15 minutes to do the same (if I am doing a search on 'body content'). In mail (which can limit searches to selected mailboxes, even though it is using Spotlight) goes one better. It not only finds the mail before i finished typing the search words, it highlights the appearance of the search p-hrase in the email itself. Nice touch, Apple.

Exchange Certificates

I'm an expert in Entourage. I have the badge to prove it. But, can I get Entourage to connect to our Exchange server without throwing up an error (three times!) about "correct certificate not installed"? No, I can't. I have scoured the help sites and read the white papers and asked everyone I know, but I still get the errors every time Entourage first connects to the server

Database Corruption

To be fair, this doesn't happen too often - in about six years of using Entourage it's only happened to me twice, but that's twice too often. My data is valuable. Maybe not to anyone else, but certainly to me! Now, I run a larger database than most people (currently around 6Gb) and keep a lot of 'stuff' in there for convenience, but that's the way I like to work. I shouldn't suffer from potential data loss because of it (unless I am doing something the programme was never intended to do!). But, quite apart form positive corruption (when I get an error message saying the database is damaged), I have also had periods of instability which have been repaired by moving all my data over to a new database. This operation, including setting up Mailing List rules, schedules, folder structures and everything else, can take more than a week to complete. To _have_ to do this is really unacceptable.

No Customisable Interface

Of all the Office Apps, Entourage is the only one where you have to live with Microsoft's fixed interface. Sure, you can turn the toolbar on or off, but that's it. No way to make the programme look & feel like yours after that. After so long, this really isn't good enough. In Mail (like many well behaved Cocoa applications) you get the ability to modify the toolbar. In Eudora, you can change it completely - orientation, icons, functions, anything. I hope things improve in Office v12.

Exchange Support

Admittedly, support for Exchange servers has been improving with every new update, but Entourage is still a long, long way behind the functionality of Outlook. I need to use Exchange for work, I really want to be able to do all the things that Outlook can do. At the moment, although I can issue invitations to events, when people respond, their status is not updated in my copy of the event. I can only access shared address books and calendars if they are another user's default address books or calendars. Tasks & notes don't exist as far as the exchange server is concerned. There's lots of other issues too - far too many to mention here.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not thinking of abandoning Entourage any time soon. I still think it is the best option out there for a PIM - especially since I need Exchange connectivity. I just think there's lots of room for improvement. I'm sure the next version of Entourage will look completely different - the move to X-Code and Cocoa will have it's benefits (as well as its drawbacks). And, the wholesale change of the codebase, while making a mammoth task for them to accomplish in a relatively short time scale, does give the opportunity for other cool things to be introduced. Already there is a public beta of the next version of Office for Windows available, and that's got a completely new interface. Some of this must surely rub off on the mac version. I'm sure that Microsoft learned their lesson with Word v6, when they tried to do a straight port of the windows code (Word for Mac v6 was an abysmally slow and unstable application - the debacle led, fairly directly to the formation of the Macintosh Business Unit, dedicated to producing _good_ macintosh programmes), so I expect to see some of the same principles introduced, but hopefully in a Mac-Like way. What new features will be in there? Who can say at this stage? I hope that some of my bugbears will have been laid to rest. If you want to know a little more about how things are shaping up, there's some information in an interview published here. The interview was with Mary Starman, "Group Product Manager for the Macintosh Business Unit", and she's talking about how the next version will look and how they are progressing. Enjoy

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lease 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.

The macBU gets blogging! Although several MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit - the people in Microsoft who write the mac software) employees already write personal blogs, the Mac Mojo blog is the 'official weblog for the Office for Mac team at Microsoft' .

Take a look, and get an insight into what it's like to work on th eMac at Microsoft, some of the problems that developers have to tackle and much, much more.

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lease 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.