Office Power Pack - demo now available

[Matt Quagliana]

Hi-

I just wanted to let everyone know that we recently released an update to
Office Power Pack Volume 1 and we now have a demo version available for
download. This is the first time we've had a demo version available and I
thought folks on this newsgroup would be interested in this news.

Designed for all Office users, Office Power Pack Volume 1 makes Microsoft
Office X and Office 2004 more useful and powerful by adding new features to
Microsoft Office and by making existing Office features easier to use.

The five applications in Office Power Pack Volume 1 are:

Address Book Merge
Enables you to easily merge Mac OS X Address Book contacts directly into
Microsoft Word to create mailing labels and envelopes.

Address Book Export
Enables you to easily export Mac OS X Address Book contacts into Microsoft
Excel to sort contacts or import them into other contact managers.

Quicken Data Mover
Enables you to easily load a Quicken® file (QIF format) into Microsoft Excel
so you can manipulate your data, and create reports and charts in Microsoft
Excel. QIF Import supports multiple accounts and split transactions.

Fax Cover Sheet Maker
Eliminates the monotony of re-typing data that's already in your Mac OS X
Address Book. Quickly generates Fax Cover Sheets in Microsoft Word.

Invoice Maker.
Ideal for consultants, graphics designers and anyone who bills other people
for their time, Invoice Maker creates professional-quality invoices in
Microsoft Word quickly and easily with a minimal amount of data entry and
formatting.

You can download a demo of Office Power Pack at:
<http://www.officepowerpack.com/>

 

[matt neuburg]

Address Book Merge
Enables you to easily merge Mac OS X Address Book contacts directly into
Microsoft Word

From the Web page info, it doesn't look like this is a true merge - it
just feeds Address Book into Office. Paul Berkowitz's script, on the
other hand, is a genuine merge (or synch). m.

 

[Matt Quagliana]

From the Web page info, it doesn't look like this is a true merge - it
just feeds Address Book into Office. Paul Berkowitz's script, on the
other hand, is a genuine merge (or synch). m.

It looks like Paul has two very handy merge scripts (among many others.) One
will merge a vCard from a mail message into your Entourage Address Book. The
other will merge two Entourage Address Book contacts into one.

The Address Book Merge feature in Office Power Pack serves a completely
different purpose. It enables the person who maintains their contacts in the
Mac OS X Address Book (not Entourage Address Book) to use Word's Data Merge
feature. In this case, the contact data is merged into a Word document (such
a form letter, mailing labels, etc.) Word offers no direct integration with
Mac OS X Address Book. Office Power Pack adds that feature to Office.

With Address Book Merge the contact data is never merged into Entourage's
Address Book, it stays in Mac OS X Address Book. It's an application that
serves a different purpose than Paul's scripts.

The best way to see the difference is to try it for yourself. The demo is
available here: <http://www.officepowerpack.com/>

 

[matt neuburg]

The Address Book Merge feature in Office Power Pack ...
enables the person who maintains their contacts in the
Mac OS X Address Book (not Entourage Address Book) to use Word's Data Merge
feature. In this case, the contact data is merged into a Word document (such
a form letter, mailing labels, etc.) Word offers no direct integration with
Mac OS X Address Book. Office Power Pack adds that feature to Office.

With Address Book Merge the contact data is never merged into Entourage's
Address Book, it stays in Mac OS X Address Book.

But anyone who uses Office is maintaining contacts in Entourage Address
Book willy-nilly. This is why Paul's scripts do something even better:
they make the Entourage Address Book and the Mac OS X Address Book the
same as one another. That way you never have to worry about which one
you're using; any functionality that uses *either* the Entourage Address
Book *or* the Mac OS X Address Book (including Office data merge, but
including lots of other stuff as well) just works. m.

 

[John McGhie]

Thanks Matt

I had thought of giving that spam the usual grizzly fate, but having you
post a nice substantiated "why not" is far more effective, I think

Other Matt: You know better than this. We don't DO advertising here! Just
because RealBasic is a great product does not mean you (or I, or even
Microsoft) gets to advertise stuff in here! Thanks...

Cheers

But anyone who uses Office is maintaining contacts in Entourage Address
Book willy-nilly. This is why Paul's scripts do something even better:
they make the Entourage Address Book and the Mac OS X Address Book the
same as one another. That way you never have to worry about which one
you're using; any functionality that uses *either* the Entourage Address
Book *or* the Mac OS X Address Book (including Office data merge, but
including lots of other stuff as well) just works. m.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Other Matt: You know better than this. We don't DO advertising here! Just

because RealBasic is a great product does not mean you (or I, or even
Microsoft) gets to advertise stuff in here! Thanks...

I thought this was a legitimate instance of a relevant announcement,
deliberately targeted (and posted by a real person). MVPs post announcements
of Office updates, that demos for the new version are available, I posted
that the EndNote demo was available, there was a MathType announcement--this
fell into the same camp, in my mind....

And we all know there are multiple ways to get anything done in Word--so
just because there are alternatives doesn't mean some people might not
appreciate learning about this product.

 

[matt neuburg]

I thought this was a legitimate instance of a relevant announcement

Yes, my view is that one should be free to make an announcement, but
since a newgroup is a two-way street, one must be willing to accept that
people can and will reply to it. m.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

It looks like Paul has two very handy merge scripts (among many others.) One
will merge a vCard from a mail message into your Entourage Address Book. The
other will merge two Entourage Address Book contacts into one.

The Address Book Merge feature in Office Power Pack serves a completely
different purpose. It enables the person who maintains their contacts in the
Mac OS X Address Book (not Entourage Address Book) to use Word's Data Merge
feature. In this case, the contact data is merged into a Word document (such
a form letter, mailing labels, etc.) Word offers no direct integration with
Mac OS X Address Book. Office Power Pack adds that feature to Office.

With Address Book Merge the contact data is never merged into Entourage's
Address Book, it stays in Mac OS X Address Book. It's an application that
serves a different purpose than Paul's scripts.

The best way to see the difference is to try it for yourself. The demo is
available here: <http://www.officepowerpack.com/>

Matt Neuburg is not talking about the two scripts of mine which happen to
contain the word "Merge" in their titles. I don't suppose he knows about
those, and they're not at all relevant here, as you say. From the
description, he's referring to my two Sync scripts: Sync Entourage-Address
Book and Sync Entourage-iCal, which do what they say. Although a quick
search for the word "Merge" on Google would not find those, a quick glance
at Macscripter.net would, since they're both sitting at the top of the list.
As Matt N. says, using them regularly means that your Office (i.e.
Entourage) Address Book and Entourage Calendar are identical to the Apple
(OS) Address Book and iCal at all times so nothing more needs to be done.
Word Mail Merges, among other things, will be operating on your complete
list of addresses in either app. So will synching to cell phones and .Mac.

Like Daiya, I have no objection to seeing an announcement about a relevant
product here. (I hardly could, since I do the same thing myself! I don't
recall John ever taking exception to my announcements.) I'll return the
favor and suggest that you try my Sync scripts (free for 14 days) for
yourself, Matt Q. The first sync is very slow - I'll warn you. After that,
it's quick.

Thanks to Matt N. for his response. He says it better than I could, or
would. We may all be irrelevant after Tiger's Sync Services get going and a
later version of Entourage plugs into that, or at least once the inevitable
bugs are dealt with. Time will tell whether there will be mechanisms for
non-parallel fields in different apps to coordinate with each other: I have
a feeling that that may be too complex for an all-purpose mechanism without
really great attention to detail on the part of synching apps like
Entourage. We'll see.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Other Matt: You know better than this. We don't DO advertising here! Just
because RealBasic is a great product does not mean you (or I, or even
Microsoft) gets to advertise stuff in here! Thanks...

:-\ as far as I am concerned, it is still on topic. It's directly
related to Office in general and Word in particular. I don't see
announcement of Office-related software release necessarely as spam.
Additionally I had the occasion of testing the app and it worked rather
well.
As far as merging contacts to Word I think it just isn't the right term.
It's more "using" than "merging".



Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Yes, my view is that one should be free to make an announcement, but
since a newgroup is a two-way street, one must be willing to accept that
people can and will reply to it. m.

True,
As far as I am concerned, announcements go both way.

Corentin