a few random questions from an inexpert user of entourage 2004 / osx 10.3

[psg2103]

hi i am not a very expert user of edntourage and some things have been
bugging me for months. i cannot find answers in the MS help window.
perhaps someone out there can give me hand? thanks;

1 - if i have the folder view window open in mail, then the left hand
columns "hide views" is open in calendar, making it more difficult to
use my calendar (it shrinks the size of everything). can i fix this in
some preference folder so that mail always shows folder views and
calendar does not?

2 - in the address book function, all the names are listed by both
first name and last name, so that alex smith is followed by alex jones
and then dave smithson. how do i keep the address book sorted by last
name? this doesn't seem to be an option.

3 - the "recently used addresses" is really really irritating.
occasionaly a recently used address will NOT pop up, but one stripped
from an email i may have received two years ago will pop up. is there
any way to set this feature to work like an "autocomplete" - the way it
worked in the version of eudora i had on my OS9 mac? that used
autocomplete from my entire address book;

4 - on a similar theme, when i click on a return address to add it to
the address book, entourage doesn;t seem to recognize the common
convention of "last name, first name" and absorbs the sender as though
the last name AND THE COMMA! were the first name. not a big thing, but
still pretty irritating.

5 - most of the time, outlook will NOT download "pictures" requiring me
to make an extra click to get the images in an email. again, i can't
find a preference or setting to fix this. it says "for privacy" reasons
it will not download the graphics.

6 - i have downloaded some scripts to fix earlier problems that you
helpful souls have counseled me with. but i can;t figure out where to
put the scripts to get them into the program. again i probably am
overlooking some simple solution, but what do i do? thanks!

7 - this is a big one - switching between the mail and address book
functions sometimes stalls my compputer for a full minute. i have
already rebuilt the database and rebooted the program andthat doesn't
help..

8 - here's an interesting one. in my misspent youth, when i strayed
from the path of mac and used a PC, i bought a cardscan brand business
card reader. totallly awesome machine, exccept they are not even
interested in developing mac software for it. it is really a twain
compliant scanner. so two questions: 1 - is there some kind of scanner
software i could use with it? 2 - does anyone know how to export the
card scan contacts into a file that i could then import into entourage?


thanks a lot and sorry for allt he qeustions, but i'll forward the
answers to micorsoft and maybe they'll fix them or answer them in the
next entoruage update.

- Peter

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi,
I don't know the answers to all of your questions, so in some cases, I had
to guess. You'll find the answers inline.

1 - if i have the folder view window open in mail, then the left hand
columns "hide views" is open in calendar, making it more difficult to
use my calendar (it shrinks the size of everything). can i fix this in
some preference folder so that mail always shows folder views and
calendar does not?

I don't think so. It used to annoy me a lot in the beginning, now I've just
grown used to it.

2 - in the address book function, all the names are listed by both
first name and last name, so that alex smith is followed by alex jones
and then dave smithson. how do i keep the address book sorted by last
name? this doesn't seem to be an option.

While the entries in the address book are displayed as "first name, last
name", they are as a matter of fact sorted by the last name. Are you really
sure that your address book doesn't behave like this? If not, try clicking
on the column bar a couple of times to change the way your entries are
arranged and see if that changes anything. I once had a problem where the
entries were not displayed correctly in other lists (e.g. when linking notes
to contacts, or when using the address list in the To: field in a new mail
message), and re-building the database did the job for me)

3 - the "recently used addresses" is really really irritating.
occasionaly a recently used address will NOT pop up, but one stripped
from an email i may have received two years ago will pop up. is there
any way to set this feature to work like an "autocomplete" - the way it
worked in the version of eudora i had on my OS9 mac? that used
autocomplete from my entire address book;

Read this article on the Entourage Help site:
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/glossary/mru.html

By the way, this website has lots of interesting tips and tricks, so if you
have some time to spare, have a look at some of the other articles, too.

4 - on a similar theme, when i click on a return address to add it to
the address book, entourage doesn;t seem to recognize the common
convention of "last name, first name" and absorbs the sender as though
the last name AND THE COMMA! were the first name. not a big thing, but
still pretty irritating.

What happens if you click on the small blue dot that's displayed in the
preview pane, next to the name and e-mail address of the sender? This gives
you another option to add the sender to your address book, and maybe this
will solve your problem.

5 - most of the time, outlook will NOT download "pictures" requiring me
to make an extra click to get the images in an email. again, i can't
find a preference or setting to fix this. it says "for privacy" reasons
it will not download the graphics.

Outlook? Surely you mean Entourage. Anyway, the download pictures setting
cannot be switched off; it's meant to protect your privacy, as some HTML
spam e-mails, when loaded, will reveal to the sender that your account is
active, which means you'll get much more spam mail than before. There is a
setting in the preferences (security section) to automatically download
entire e-mails from your address book pictures. Also, you can set up domains
which you know to be safe in the Safe Domains list of your Junk E-mail
Protection (Tools>Junk E-mail Protection). If you don't want this feature at
all, you should add ".com", ".net" and ".org" (without the quotation marks)
to the white list, as this will cover most of the e-mails you're likely to
get. I would not recommend this option unless you really know what you're
doing.

6 - i have downloaded some scripts to fix earlier problems that you
helpful souls have counseled me with. but i can;t figure out where to
put the scripts to get them into the program. again i probably am
overlooking some simple solution, but what do i do? thanks!

Simply drag them to /<your user name>/Documents/Microsoft User
Data/Entourage Menu Items, and they should be available from within
Entourage.

7 - this is a big one - switching between the mail and address book
functions sometimes stalls my compputer for a full minute. i have
already rebuilt the database and rebooted the program andthat doesn't
help..

Can't really help you on this one. Rebuilding your database should eliminate
most problems. Maybe some other program is interfering; do you have any
other applications running in the background when this happens?

8 - here's an interesting one. in my misspent youth, when i strayed
from the path of mac and used a PC, i bought a cardscan brand business
card reader. totallly awesome machine, exccept they are not even
interested in developing mac software for it. it is really a twain
compliant scanner. so two questions: 1 - is there some kind of scanner
software i could use with it? 2 - does anyone know how to export the
card scan contacts into a file that i could then import into entourage?

If it's a TWAIN scanner, have you tried using Image Capture, which is part
of your Mac OS X installation? If that doesn't work, try VueScan
<http://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html>, which works with most scanners. As for
getting these contacts into Entourage, I don't know; maybe use an OCR
software to create a text file of your contacts? But it sounds awfully
complicated, and anyway, I'm not an expert on these things, so maybe someone
else can give you a better answer. Alternatively, you could get VirtualPC,
developed by Microsoft, to run Windows on your Mac. You could then install
the Windows software that came with the scanner in your virtual environment.