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4 Smileys - 1 Smiley Poor, 5 Smileys Excellent
Platforms: Mac OS
Forward
Entourage 2001 is a natural progression from Outlook Express 5, a free email and news client from Microsoft that is still being offered. Entourage keeps the email and newsgroups capabilities from Outlook Express as well as the interface, and adds a personal information manager (PIM) that keeps track of tasks, notes, appointments, contacts, and more. For those of you who are users of either Outlook Express or Claris Emailer, the interface of Entourage will be very familiar to you. Unlike Eudora, which has a very modular appearance, Entourage centers all of the information around one main window. I have always found this interface style to be much easier to understand and use than digging through a bunch of windows just to find the Inbox. Whatever your preference, Entourage's interface remains uncluttered even though its capabilities have greatly expanded over Outlook Express.
Email and News
Entourage retains all of the email and newsgroups features from Outlook Express 5 but doesn't add very many new ones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because Outlook Express is full-featured and there are few bad things I would say about it. However, if you were expecting radical changes and/or improvements then you will be disappointed. Especially with regards to newsgroups, which took a step backwards between Outlook Express 4.5 and 5 and hasn't recovered yet. It still is impossible to create complex HTML or to embed pictures within an email. In fact, most of the enhancements are related to the PIM such as the improved address book, flags, links, and categories. So if you're a happy Outlook Express user and have no desire for a PIM then there is no need to rush out and buy Office 2001 if all you want is an updated Outlook Express. If you're currently a user of another email client and want to know more about Outlook Express 5 and hence most of the email and newsgroups portion of Entourage, read the excellent guide at MacOptions. Then come back to read what Entourage has to offer that Outlook Express doesn't. Since most of the enhancements are related to the PIM, let's now go into depth on what the PIM is and how it interfaces with email.
Address Book
The address book has dramatically improved over what was found in Outlook Express. When you open a contact you are given a summary of all of the information that they have, as you can see in the screenshot to the right. You don't need to go to each of the tabs to get the person's address or phone number unless you need to change or add information. You can even add a picture and notes so you should never need to wrack your brain to remember who this person is. In the Personal tab, you can add their birthday and anniversary dates and then automatically put them on the calendar. Entourage even calculates their age and astrological sign for you. If the person is married, there are even spots for the name of their spouse and children. Unfortunately, there is no place for the children's birthdays so you'll need to put them in the calendar yourself; perhaps in the eight custom fields and two custom date fields. If you have an active Internet connection, Entourage also lets you map the address, get driving directions from your work or home, and goes to their home page using your Internet browser. Pretty darn snazzy, if you ask me, and I haven't seen a better address book in all of the other PIMs currently on the market.
Tasks
Everybody has things that they need to do and often, they are kept in lists that tend to get lost or forgotten. Keeping tasks in the computer is an elegant solution not only because they can't get lost or forgotten, but they can be repeated in almost any pattern and you can be reminded to do the task before it's due. Always handy when the task is an important one, such as homework or a report for your job. Creating a task is pretty easy. Just enter in the name, when it's due, its priority (otherwise known as importance), category (discussed later), and when you want to be reminded to start working on the task. If you want it to be a recurring task just click on the button which brings up another window for you to enter in the information. You can also add notes about the task in the white space.
In the Recurring Task window, a task can repeat in nearly any possibility. If you want the task to be repeated on Monday and Wednesday every other week, you can do it. If you want the task to be repeated every year, you can do it. However, be sure that the task starts on the correct day before you set the recurring schedule. For example, let's say I create a task that starts today and repeats every day for the next five days. Suppose something comes up and I can't start the task until the next day. Entourage doesn't simply adjust when the task ends, but gives me an error message that says "To change the due date of all tasks in a recurring series, click Cancel and edit the recurrence pattern directly." If you click OK, the recurrence pattern is removed and you have to reenter it for it to be saved. If you click Cancel, you're brought back to the task with no changes. If you save again, the task is saved without a problem. This is such a bother and I do this a few times every week so I wish that you didn't have to go through this every time you edited a recurring task.
You can view all of the tasks or only the incomplete or complete tasks that are due today, this week, or forever. You can see at a glance their priority, what links they have (more on this later), whether they are recurring, when they are due, their category (more on this later), and the all-important completion button that you click on when you've finally completed a task. One feature that I do miss from Palm Desktop is how it handles reminding you of upcoming tasks. Entourage pops up a window with the task's name and gives you to the options of dismissing the alarm, snoozing for a number of minutes or hours or days, and deleting the task among others. However, it's easy to dismiss this alarm and totally forget about the task. What Palm Desktop does is basically create an alias that appears before the task is due and has the due date in the name. For example, the alias might appear as "Write very important report (Due: Jan. 25)" In Entourage, you can't easily see when a task is due and you have to double-click it to find out. I would very much like this to be added even though you can get around the problem by creating a repeating task on all of the days that you want to work on the task. I found the idea of creating task aliases indispensable in Palm Desktop and I think Entourage will benefit greatly by having it as well. These relatively minor problems aside, the managing of tasks is very good although I had to change some of ways that I'm used to working with them.
Calendar
Creating a calendar event is as easy as creating a task. All you have to do is put in the name, the location (if applicable), when it starts and ends, the starting and ending times or if it's an all day event, recurrence (if applicable), reminder, category (to be discussed soon), and travel time (if applicable). You can also add notes in that white space if you want to.
Entourage gives you five different ways to view your appointments and events: Day, Week, Work Week, Month, and List. If you want to look at a different day, just click on the day in the mini-calendar at the top. If you want to look at two or more consecutive days, just click and hold until you have highlighted the ones you want and then release the mouse button. You can't select days that aren't next to each other, which would have been nice. The one thing I didn't like is that you can't change the time intervals in the Day, Week, and Work Week views so they're fixed at 30-minutes. This would be handy because you can highlight a time interval and double-click to make an appointment. Since you're stuck at 30-minute intervals, you have to change the times more often than not. The only way you can magnify these views is to simply look at fewer days at a time. So if you're looking at a full week, the appointments are rather small and the titles get cut off. You can hover your cursor over the appointment and the full name gets displayed in a little pop-up display. My favorite view is the List view, which shows all of the appointments and tasks in a list. You don't see the categories and priorities of the tasks but since the List view is such a nice summary of what needs to be done, I don't mind so much. Even though the calendar isn't perfect, I found that it's quite handy in getting an overview of what you have to do and where you have to be for a range of days.
Linking it All Together and Other Neat Stuff
So now you have a lot of information in Entourage and they are all in their corners, totally separate from each other. But what if you want to link information together? What if you have to work on a report that is due at noon next Wednesday and you have to email it to your boss? Thankfully, Entourage provides a Link Maker that lets you connect these pieces easily. In this example, you link from the task reminding you to write the report to both your boss's contact information and the external file. Later on, you can even link it to the email that you sent to your boss so you can find it easily. This way all of the information about a task or appointment can be gotten to from all related tasks and appointments. Flags are another way to remind yourself to answer an important email. Let's say that Marc Messer writes me an email that needs to be responded to immediately. Since I get distracted easily by Diablo 2, I can flag his email for follow-up which automatically makes a task, links it to the message, and changes the Message Status to a little red flag. If I don't want to make a task, I can just flag the message which changes the Message Status but doesn't do anything else. That means that I'll be reminded to answer Marc's email at the earliest possible time.
I mentioned categories earlier and you might have been wondering what they are and why they are important. Categories let you put everything in Entourage into groups, each with a color of your choosing. The category is the only thing that shows, at a glance, what the task or email or appointment relates to. You can change the categories manually, automatically change emails to the categories of the senders' categories, or change them in a rule. More importantly, you can easily view everything in a category to either link them together or to edit the tasks, or for anything else. You can also create Custom Views which lets you quickly view, for example, everything that has to do with the Mac OS Journal. If there were no such things as categories, this would be much more difficult to do. Custom Views work much like rules and it's very easy to make them show just what you want.
Conclusion I really like Entourage and it helped my last two months in college immensely by keeping track of all of the people I had to email, homework I had to turn in, and the many meetings I had to attend. Entourage isn't perfect and there are areas that can be improved, but there are ways to get around them even though I don't think they are as elegant as could be possible. The interface is clean and easy-to-use and learn. Combining email with the personal information manager was a great idea since email is such a big part of my life and many others. If you are looking for a way to organize your life and have a powerful email client to organize your email, Entourage is a great product to use. Unfortunately, Entourage isn't available as a separate product, but only as a part of Office 2001. Entourage is a great product and if you need a reason to upgrade from Office 98, I can't find a better reason to do so.
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