Calendar views in Entourage

[Jesse Garner]

I use the main calendar in Entourage for pretty much everything in my life -
classes, work scheduling, events, clubs, etc. So my calendar gets pretty
junky with events on top of events. I recently switched from Outlook XP to
my new mac (I think I'm a new believer) but was surprised to find that
custom views in the calendar don't actually display a calendar - just a list
of dates.

Is there a way to have all of the events in one category display on an
actual calendar, rather than as a list of dates?

Also, although I am a new enthusiast for most of the new mac programs that I
am learning, I must say that the Outlook to Entourage transfer has been
rocky. I just don't feel the raw customizible power in Entourage that I had
in Outlook (power user). Is this something that is going to improve over
time (with the new Office for Mac 2004)? Or will I find more power as I get
deeper into this program?

Thanks!

Jesse Garner

 

[Bob Shoemaker]

All the custom views in Entourage X are displayed as lists. The Monthly,
Weekly and Daily views do not have filters to show only specific categories
of events. That would be a good thing to suggest to the Entourage
development team, if it is not already on their plate.

As for Entourage 2004 - while Microsoft has announced an impending release
in the first half of this year of a new Office version, they are pretty
skimpy on some of the features in specific applications.Watch the Mactopia
web site for announcements on what to expect in Office 2004.

Outlook for the PC was designed to be an email client for the Microsoft
Exchange Server and is loaded with tons of corporate-oriented features to
make life easier for the business person.

Entourage was initially designed for a more recreational email user and is
basically Outlook Express on steroids. The most recent release of
Entourage - 10.1.4 - incorporates an ability to get more features when
connecting to the Exchange Server, such as an expanded calendar. It lacks
some of the features of Outlook 2001 for Mac: Exchange Server Edition for OS
9.x - which also was a step down from Outlook on the PC.

As with all programs - they are expensive to develop and market - often the
number of people expected to use a product (and pay for it) dictates the
amount of development it gets. The demand for corporate level email features
for the Mac is significant, very vocal, but fairly sparse. So I would not be
expecting feature parity with Outlook in the near future.

Hope this helps.

 

[Jesse Garner]

Thanks, Bob.

I'll suggest that to the mac team for a future version.

For the short term, I'm thinking my solution will be to find a script that
exports my calendar to iCal (and hopefully will update it after the initial
transfer instead of duplicating events every time). iCal allows me to view
different categories of events separately (and prints them much easier than
in Entourage).

Jesse

 

[Jesse Garner]

I found a better solution! Thank you to the wonderful resources in the FAQ
at the Entourage help page!

At the top of the calendar is the bar "subject contains" and a blank box for
text to search. Click on "subject contains" and change it to "category is"
and then pick your category. You will only be shown those events while still
in an actual calendar view!

One disadvantage is that you cannot show multiple categories at the same
time. There is a way to work around this...I think. If you want to have a
personal dinner show up in the view of your work category, go into the
personal event and give it the work category as a secondary category. When
you show only your work category (at the top right), the dinner will show
up, but still retain the color of its primary category - personal. Kinda
roundabout, but workable.

Hope that helps someone at some point.

Jesse

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

iCal has an "Import from Entourage" feature that will import your Entourage
calendar, but ignores categories and puts the whole thing into a single new
calendar called "Entourage". (iCal has a gawky implementation that has
separate "calendars", rather than a calendar with separate "categories" as
Entourage has. It may look the same to you, and at the moment prints
separate calendars better than Entourage prints separate categories, as you
say, but it has lots of limitations. In particular, you can't assign more
than one category/calendar to an event.) You'd have to re-enter every
"Entourage"-calendar event into one of your standard iCal calendars to get
the color. Very tedious.

In due course, if the next version of Entourage (2004) has scriptable
modification dates of events, which I'd hope, then I'll make and release a
Sync Entourage-iCal script. In the meantime, I don't think there's any
script which will import events into existing iCal calendars. For a start,
the colors of iCal calendars are not scriptable, so creating a new calendar
to correspond with an Entourage category that has no iCal calendar
counterpart yet would be very awkward.

In the meantime, if you don't want to recreate every "Entourage" event in a
different iCal calendar, I recommend you do what Bob suggested, and print
out your Entourage calendar (month, week or day) in List View.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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