Exporting tasks from Entourage 2008 - the long and short of it

[Jeff Chapman]

Hello all - I've recently been working a lot with sorting and organizing
tasks in Entourage, and I've come across some issues that have really been
annoying me. Most of the issues, I've already posted to Microsoft for their
(hopeful) future product upgrades; but I'm wondering if anyone else here has
some to similar conclusions about the utter inability of Entourage 2008 to
play nice with other Office for Mac apps in terms of tasks, or the really
limited export functionality.

I've summarized my findings on a few blog posts, but I'll also print them
below for comments from any newsgroup members who want to share their beefs
about it!

* To-do tasks cannot be copied and pasted from Entourage 2008 to any
other application en masse. The only exception I have seen is that task
names can be dragged and dropped from Entourage to Excel 2008... one at a
time. Neither the categories, nor the project names you may have assigned to
the task‹no, not even the start or end dates will follow suite.
* Tasks cannot be exported to any other format besides .ics or .rge
(Entourage¹s proprietary format). What this means is that you¹re stuck in
the water if you want to copy or export your Entourage tasks to some other
application.
* Tasks cannot be dragged to the calendar to create new appointments in
Entourage 2008. This has been standard functionality for Outlook as far as I
remember. Apple¹s iCal will do it too. I find it immensely helpful when I
want to maintain a task list on the task pad (to-do list), and then drag the
tasks to make calendar appointments. It saves me the trouble of retyping the
task as an appointment. Sadly, Entourage 2008 does not offer such a
courtesy.
* Entourage¹s proprietary database format cannot be read by any other
application besides Entourage.
* Text outputted from Entourage 2008 task lists as PDF is nearly
unusable, because Entourage 2008 decides that no tabs or delimiting
characters are required to separate the different columns in Entourage (for
instance, ³title², ³categories², ³due date², ³projects² and so on). What
this means to you is that if there are any other columns (fields) outputted
in your PDF from Entourage, the columns will all be mercilessly mashed
together into one line. No tabs, no spaces, no way to separate the columns -
just one big heap of information.

(condensed from http://blog.jchap.net/?p=9 and http://blog.jchap.net/?p=10)

I know it sounds pretty negative, and I hate to make the feature parity
comparison between Outl**k and Entourage... but after all of this, I really
must admit to a serious dose of disappointment with Entourage when it comes
to handling and exporting task data.

Fixes? Workarounds? Comments? Would love to hear them...

Jeff

 

[Diane Ross]

Tasks cannot be exported to any other format besides .ics or .rge
(Entourage¹s proprietary format).

You can get a text file using Paul Berkowitz's Export-Import scripts, but as
you mentioned in exporting as PDF, it's a jumbled mess.

Everyone that would like to see improvements for Tasks should also send
their feedback. Squeaky wheel get noticed.

Send feedback to Microsoft.

When working in Office, you can use the ³Send Feedback² option under the
Help menu in all of the Office applications or visit

<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/suggestions.mspx>

Paul Berkowitz's Export-Import Shareware $20

ScriptBuilders: Export-Import Entourage 1.3.10
<http://scriptbuilders.net/files/exportimportentourage1.3.10.html>

 

[Jeff Chapman]

Thanks for the reply, Diane - I kind of figured this was the case...
I've already sent feedback to Microsoft... but it's impossible to tell if
they will read it or do anything with it. I imagine that someone may read
it, but since Microsoft never informs us about what most users want or about
what kind of feedback they are getting, and we never get personalized
replies (let alone automated e-mail acknowledgements!) for any ideas or
contributions to their software, we just have to complain, and hope.

In the meantime, I'll find a more effective way of managing my tasks that
won't tightly bind me to a proprietary data platform, one that will allow me
to at least "get the text out" of the task data and repurpose it in some
other application without jumping through tight and brutal hoops. Even
Outlook allows me to output my tasks in CSV, Access, Excel or tab separated
value format. I realize that the target users and market may be different,
but having that flexibility may mean the difference between having a working
archive of tasks five years down the road vs. a broken database of
proprietary code locked in an .rge file that no application can open. (Worst
case scenario - maybe. But even the potential of data loss raises trust
issues.)

Jeff