New Event futziness

[John Laudun]

My apologies for the use of the word "futziness" in the subject line, but
it's all I could think to describe the problems I've been having with
Entourage 2004 and creating new events in calendar view.*

When creating new events, I tab through all the usual boxes, setting up
location, start time, but I am having a devil of a time with the end time:
it just seems to want to lock up if I tab to the end time and want to either
simply type in the end time, the way I did in the start time, or if I want
to change anything once it's in: like changing the display from minutes to
hours. Instead of calculating the 120 minutes is 2 hours, it bumps the end
time to 120 hours. That's just dumb. Or sometimes if I try to set the time,
and I don't make it to the AM/PM toggle fast enough, it calculate a negative
duration Š and, it just gets ugly.

I feel like I regularly am having to wrestle this enough that there is no
feature involved, only bugs. Am I alone in facing this? (I'm going to
double-check my update now, just to make sure maybe I missed an update
that's causing this grief.)

John Laudun
____________________________
John Laudun
Associate Director
Center for Louisiana Studies
University of Louisiana
Lafayette, LA 70504
337-482-5703


*Running Office 2004 on OS 10.4.2 on a PowerBook with a gig of RAM.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

My apologies for the use of the word "futziness" in the subject line, but
it's all I could think to describe the problems I've been having with
Entourage 2004 and creating new events in calendar view.*

When creating new events, I tab through all the usual boxes, setting up
location, start time, but I am having a devil of a time with the end time:
it just seems to want to lock up if I tab to the end time and want to either
simply type in the end time, the way I did in the start time, or if I want
to change anything once it's in: like changing the display from minutes to
hours. Instead of calculating the 120 minutes is 2 hours, it bumps the end
time to 120 hours. That's just dumb. Or sometimes if I try to set the time,
and I don't make it to the AM/PM toggle fast enough, it calculate a negative
duration Š and, it just gets ugly.

I feel like I regularly am having to wrestle this enough that there is no
feature involved, only bugs. Am I alone in facing this? (I'm going to
double-check my update now, just to make sure maybe I missed an update
that's causing this grief.)

Do you use the arrow keys while in Start Time, or anywhere else before you
get to End Time? There's some bug that makes various text boxes
uncontrollable if you use the arrow keys, so it's not worth it. It's
possible - though I have not run into it myself - that using the Tab key
might create similar problems. None of this ever happens to me if I
mouse-click instead of tabbing. I think you'll find that if you use the
mouse for moving to the next field you won't get any of these problems.

I'm not sure I quite understand what you're objecting to with minutes/hours,
though. Can you give more steps? Naturally if you change the Minutes popup
to Hours, the number will stay the same (120) and you'll have to change that
too. Why don't you just leave it at 120 minutes? (I think you'll find that
after you save and close, then re-open, it will now display as 2 hours. But
while you're in there changing things, it has to allow for the fact that you
might actually _want_ 120 hours unless you change it.)

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

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[Michel Bintener]

Do you use the arrow keys while in Start Time, or anywhere else before you
get to End Time? There's some bug that makes various text boxes
uncontrollable if you use the arrow keys, so it's not worth it. It's
possible - though I have not run into it myself - that using the Tab key
might create similar problems. None of this ever happens to me if I
mouse-click instead of tabbing. I think you'll find that if you use the
mouse for moving to the next field you won't get any of these problems.

I can actually confirm that I get this erratic behaviour every time I try to
use the Tab key/arrow key combination, and it's extremely annoying when
you're on a laptop and you're forced to use the trackpad to enter a calendar
event. And it's annoying even on a desktop computer, since using the Tab
key/arrow keys is much faster than having to select every single field with
the mouse and then use the numeric keypad to enter the time. In addition to
some fields being locked, it is impossible for me to close that window using
the Cmd+W key combination: the menu bar is highlighted, as if the
combination was working, but the window remains open, and only by clicking
on the "close" button in the upper left corner can I actually close it.

 

[John Laudun]

I can actually confirm that I get this erratic behaviour every time I try to
use the Tab key/arrow key combination, and it's extremely annoying when
you're on a laptop and you're forced to use the trackpad to enter a calendar
event. And it's annoying even on a desktop computer, since using the Tab
key/arrow keys is much faster than having to select every single field with
the mouse and then use the numeric keypad to enter the time. In addition to
some fields being locked, it is impossible for me to close that window using
the Cmd+W key combination: the menu bar is highlighted, as if the
combination was working, but the window remains open, and only by clicking
on the "close" button in the upper left corner can I actually close it.

YES! Exactly. Futzy here means "damned near locked up." And, like Michel, I
use a notebook -- and even when I'm on my desktop, I tend to be a keyboard
person.

But, yes, I could see what you mean about Entourage thinking I wanted to
make it 120 hours -- but it seems to me that if I wanted that, first I would
switch to hours and then input the amount. Otherwise, as a user, I kinda
expect Entourage to perform a conversion for me.