Other Sites
- Provides: e-mail client with attached Calendar, Project Center, and Address Book
- Format: DVD
- Developer: Microsoft
- Minimum Requirements: 500MHz PowerPC G4 or Intel processor, Mac os X v10.4.9, 512MB RAM, 1.5GB hard disk space, DVD drive, 1024x768 display, Internet access (for Entourage and certain features)
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price (As part of Office 2008): Student version: $149.95, Office version: $399.95, w/ Expression Media: $499.95. (Please note download discounts and upgrade prices at Microsoft's website.)
- Availability: Out now
Entourage is a strong mail program. It's coupled with an address book, calendar, notes, tasks, and a project center that works with the rest of Office 2008. There's much to like with Entourage, and I do like it. However, as you push Entourage to access all of the features, you find it also has inefficient dynamics. One has to go to too many different places to accomplish tasks that should be accessed via similar or consistent routes. Despite that, I like Entourage very much and find that it satisfies my needs better than Apple's Mail program.
[Note: This is one part of a 6 part review. We recommend you read the Office 2008 Overview before reading this or any other review as it describes a number of features and dynamics that cover all of the Office programs.]
When you open Entourage, you must first enter your e-mail information. There is a wizard to guide you through the various parameters of what needs to be entered. If you are coming from Mail, Eudora, or any other client e-mail program, it is amazing how every program seems to have it's own terminology for what to enter and where. I can offer little guidance, but I can offer encouragement. Nonetheless, you can easily transfer your Mail e-mails into Entourage to see how you like it. And, if you are using IMAP mail, it doesn't hurt to try. Surprisingly, there is no direct route to get your Address book information into the Address part of Entourage. The best you can do is perform an export of the data as a tab-delineated-text file and import that into the Address portion of Entourage.
The basic layout of Entourage is user-variable. Your mail locations are on the left with your mail messages on the right and various control, as icons, across the top. It's possible to preview the message either to the right as seen below...
...or below the e-mail listings as seen below. The image below also shows the e-mail previewed below the messages, but you can extend the length of the e-mail listings by not displaying the preview. To see the content, you double-click each message for the message to display in a new window. Notice that in the image above you can only display one or two columns of information about the mail, while in the image below you can show a number of columns, and, by clicking on the respective header, you can sort on that header. More on that in a moment.
Also note in the image below that another option available is for the display of monthly calendars in the bottom left. You can display as many months as you have room for. The convenience of this is obvious: how many times have you been in the middle of composing an e-mail and you weren't sure if the 20th was Friday or Saturday? Since part of Entourage is a calendar program, the inclusion of this is obvious.
Now, the question is how does one flip from the listings on the side to the listings above. There is no icon on the top to direct this view, and one might think it would be a contextual menu. Or, alternatively, maybe it's in the Preferences. Nope, it's in the View menu. That was the third place I looked. See below.
I found that with the Preview Pane below the e-mail list was my favorite format. What you can't do (and this will disappoint any of the Eudora users out there who deeply miss this gem) is have mail sorted by date and grouped by subject. However, what you can do is have mail sorted by grouped subjects in chronological order.
It's not uncommon for me to get several hundred e-mails a day that I need to quickly sort through and deal with. An effective means of doing this with Entourage is to first look at the e-mails sorted chronologically (click on the "Received" column header), and if I see a message with a thread I want to follow, I click on the message and then click on the Subject column header. This groups the e-mail by subject, and because I selected one of the messages, that thread will be visible after changing the selected column. In addition, notice that I've set this column to group related threads together as seen below.
If you want to select which items will have their own column listing, you can either do a Control(right)-click (Contextual menu) or go to the View menu and select which columns to show or not show.
So I had this thought that since the columns could be selected by either the Contextual menu or the View menu, surely one could group the items in a column by either a contextual menu or the View menu. Nope, that's only in the View menu as shown below. However, if you have the Preview set to show on the right (see the first screen capture in this review, if you do a Contextual menu from the single column displayed you do have an option to "Show in Groups" or not. Yes, it's screwy and inconsistent.
Again: if you click on any of the column headers, you will sort by that item. But, if you want to view a Grouped view of that sorted listing, then you have to go to the View menu—unless you have the Preview set to show on the right.
Simply put, I like redundancy. Not everyone thinks alike, and while some may assume one approach is logical, another may not. It is small things like these that cause me to spend a considerable amount of time fishing for where controls are located. It's not just in Entourage, but throughout Office 2008 that I found these illogical location dynamics. While Microsoft has done a good job in making some features more discoverable, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Like a number of people, I have two main e-mail addresses, and Entourage, like just about all e-mail client programs lets you subscribe to as many as you want. One of the things that baffles me is that in my primary e-mail, my junk e-mail is identified as Spam; in my secondary e-mail, my spam is identified as junk e-mail. Curious.
Speaking of spam, when you get valid e-mail that was interpreted as spam, you have a variety of mechanisms to control subsequent e-mails from that source to not be spam in the future. However, this is limited to each e-mail address. Thus, if you have address-1 and address-2 and you get an e-mail for the same source to both of your addresses, you will have to set the same person's specifics in each of your addresses.
As I'm sure most of you know, if you respond to a spam mailing, you ensure you will get more spam. Thus, the best thing to do with spam that still gets through whatever filters you've set is to simply select the message and declare it as spam. Entourage will then move it into the Spam or Junk folder for subsequent trashing. Alternatively, you can select "Block Sender" from the Message menu. Any subsequent messages from that sender get automatically sent to the Spam or Junk folder with no action required from your part.
Again, this option should be available from a Contextual menu.
You can easily create a rule for sorting and manipulating incoming e-mails within Entourage. If an e-mail in question is currently selected, any identifying dynamic will automatically show up in the respective field in the Rules. (Surprisingly there is no keyboard shortcut nor contextual menu to bring up the Rules dialog and is only accessed via the Tools menu.)
There is a wide range of categories to define how you want to focus on the message to make it unique, as displayed below:
Similarly, there is an excellent range of controls on how to to apply your rules, and you can have many many layers contained within a given rule.
Beside receiving, reviewing, and sorting messages, probably the next most important (if not the most important) is finding specific messages. Alas, I found this to be one of the most problematic issues within Entourage.
There are two different ways to search for specific e-mail, both of which are found in the upper right region of the Entourage window. You can filter your e-mail by selecting a specific field that you want to focus on, and then you can select "Starts with" or "Contains." Alternatively, you can put your keyword in the Spotlight search field and let Apple's Spotlight search through your e-mails. Unfortunately, you must check each of your e-mail addresses for a given search (you cannot search globally through all of your e-mails addresses). In addition, the contents of the Spotlights field is emptied for each search. Fortunately, there is a dropdown menu where past searches are stored, and you can easily re-use past search terms. To be honest, I do not know if the failures for Entourage to find mails was related to my Spotlight acting up, failures of Entourage, or some combination of the two. Unfortunately there were times when I could see a message that satisfied my search, but it was not selected as a candidate to examine.
On a separate issue, also seen in the image above is an icon for Send/Receive. You can use this to initiate Entourage to get your mail. However, using this was messing up my brain until I realized that you can click on either the right half or the left half. If you click on the right half, you get a dropdown menu, as shown below.
However, if you click on the left half of the icon, it will simply perform the action of "Send & Receive All." All of the icons with dropdown menus work with the left half having different dynamics than the right half. You have been warned.
Obviously, when it comes to your e-mail, you would like it to be checked on a regular basis. If the default 10 minutes is not acceptable for you, you might find it challenging to change this setting. The following is how to set reoccurring dynamics in Entourage. Consider this an extra treat from Applelinks to you:
- From the Tools menu -> Run Schedules -> Edit Schedules. This will bring up the window in the top part of the window below.
- Right/Control-click on the "Send & Receive" listing shown below and select "Open Schedules."
- This brings up the 2nd window below called "Edit Schedules." Make changes as desired.
There, that was easy, wasn't it?
Why this isn't located in Preferences is beyond me.
As stated, Entourage is not only an e-mail program, but also a full Calendar, Event, and Project center. Focusing on the Calendar dynamics for a moment, if you click on the third icon from the left in the upper right, you switch to the Calendar view.
Here, you can view either by day, work week, calendar week, or month. Double-clicking on the date of any day or any specific time will bring up the Event Scheduler, which is pretty straightforward and is shown below. Events that extend past a day are automatically indicated by a ribbon across multiple days.
When you first install Office, you may find a new application popping up that you didn't realize you had. It is called "My Day." While I have no real objection to this little application in general, I didn't like the fact that at no time was there ever an option for you (the user) to define whether it should show up. What My Day does is show any events you have for the day, as well as any e-mails that have been marked with ToDo flags. I tend to use ToDo flags for marking files that need some attention later on (as opposed to a specific action that will need to be dealt with), and I collect a lot of "To Dos." The other dynamic is, "How does one prevent this thing from starting every time I start the computer?" The secret is to click on the My Day application and then select its Preferences, also displayed below. If you uncheck the option "Open after computer logon" (which is checked by default by Microsoft) it will not show up again. If you later decide you do want this, you can start it by selecting "My Day" from the Window menu.
I'd like to say that everything is perfect with Entourage, but alas, it would make my role as a reviewer somewhat suspect. It is not uncommon to get error messages that do not seem to mean anything or with information I do not know what to do with. For example, see the message below. Obviously, there is an issue with message #1334. However, since I didn't have any message selected, I do not know which message is #1334, and I didn't feel like counting all of my messages (I had over 1,500 at the time of this Error report) and I do not have a clue as to what Error: 1025 implies.
I certainly can't fault Microsoft for having obtuse error message, as they are not alone in that regard. There are many programs that provide error messages that would be no less helpful were they written in classic Greek.
However, where I will fault Microsoft is when messages prevent us from making our own decisions. Case in point: some time back I received the following message:
Notice that nowhere in this warning is any option to let me chose to accept this message. In theory I have no problem with this message: there may be a known virus, spyware, or Trojan horse contained therein. However, if it is such a known entity, then I should be getting a more specific message. Also, since this is a "Potentially" unsafe message, that also means it's a "Potentially" harmless item. However, I will never know, as I had no mechanism to view it. [For what it's worth, I had a chance to see this item by accessing the message from the server, and it was an attachment from a junk mail. But that's not the point, Entourage was over-protecting me, and I had no way to override that.]
There was one bug introduced after updating to Office 12.1 that I should mention and save you some grief. However, this bug will only show up if you subscribe to a forum that sends the messages out as e-mail. If so, this bug's for you: Typically the forum's e-mail will come to you with the "From" field identified as the person who wrote that note, but the note was sent to you by the forum, not that specific person. If you happen to inadvertently add a sender (from that forum) into your Address book, subsequent e-mails from that forum will all show up as coming from that one individual. Until this is fixed in a future update, the only way to prevent this is to remove that entry from your Address book.
Not all of Entourage's problems are that overt. One simple complaint I had is that there is no "Undo" after trashing a message. Consider: you are going through several hundred messages and inadvertently click on the Trash Can icon on a message that you would prefer to keep. Since you can't undo that action, you need to open the deleted messages and weed through them to find the one message you wanted. This is one of those small, but oh-so-important little things in life.
Overall, despite all of these complaints, I do like Entourage. Probably my biggest complaint is how difficult it is to find some of the program's dynamics. Consolidating all of these items into the Preferences and/or making more of the options available as Contextual menus would prove to be a big asset in these regards. Some may question why I'm giving Entourage a "4 out of 5" rating, but simply looking at the competition makes the problems more tolerable.
- See other Microsoft Office 2008 product reviews.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Hot Topics ď Reviews ď Business/Office Suites ď Internet Reviews ď
