First Look: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008

Entourage

Entourage

Even if you have to use the other Office apps every day, you might have no need to ever open Entourage. Apple's Mail, iCal, and Address Book have many fans, but Entourage isn't as bad as it's often made out to be. And if you need to use Exchange for your e-mail, then really it's your only choice for an e-mail program.

For those of us for whom this is the case, the news is good, especially if you're anything like me and therefore spend half the day working with it. Out of all the Office 2004 applications, Entourage seemed to run by far the slowest in Rosetta.

Probably the number one strike against Entourage before was its rendering of HTML emails; they were slow to draw, and made the program sluggish. Not any more, though. HTML Messages display instantly, although by default images won't be displayed.

Unfortunately, it is a case of swings and roundabouts, and now in my opinion, plain text messages just don't look right, perhaps because the fonts are being anti-aliased.

Integration with Exchange might not be quite as feature-replete as our PC-using cousins enjoy via Outlook, but I've found the experience utterly painless. Shared calendars work perfectly, and global address books show up, although I've found that these can take some time to display.

One issue I've noticed is that the upgrade from 2004 to 2008 resulted in many of my Exchange mail rules breaking. Whether this is due to a bug only present in the pre-release version Microsoft were kind enough to give us access to, or whether the retail version will do the same thing is unknown.

As before, all your e-mails are stored in a single monolithic database file, which causes problems when you use Time Machine. This is due to the fact that each and every time the database changes (which is each and every time you get or delete an e-mail), Time Machine wants to make a new copy, and when that file is several GB in size—well, you get the idea. Despite being one single file, Entourage will create an index file that allows Spotlight to find your messages for you. Although Microsoft are touting this as a new feature of Office 2008, it was in fact added to Office 2004 via an update. The fact that Spotlight can search through your e-mails is a good thing, because although Entourage 2008 boasts a new and more efficient search, I've not found it so. Occasionally a search term results in success, but more often than not I get no results at all, even for a query that I know ought to result in hundreds of matches.

But e-mail isn't Entourage's only function; there's also the calendar, address book, notes, tasks, and the project center.

Taking the calendar first, you get a range of views from just one day to a whole month, with a sidebar that shows your To Do list on the right and another that has a list of calendars and custom views on the left. The calendar has been improved a little from Office 2004, and you can create and move events in the same way you would in iCal. But unlike iCal, you won't have multiple calendars present on your actual Mac; any additional calendars in this side bar will be Exchange calendars. In order to replicate iCal's multiple calendars, Entourage uses categories. Messages, contacts, events, tasks, and the like can all be assigned a category, making it easy to pick out what belongs to what. This feature isn't new, having been in Entourage since its debut from the flames of Outlook Express 5, but in my opinion it's a jolly good one. The lack of a comparable feature in Apple's offerings has kept me from migrating on more than one occasion.

Speaking of those applications, you have the option to enable syncing between Entourage and Address Book and iCal, and you can sync your notes with Mail. This is handier than you might think, since it allows you to then use iSync to keep your contacts on your phone, and iTunes to put them on your iPod, and generally do all the things every other Mac user does. The syncing is nearly real time and goes both ways, so editing a contact in Address Book changes it shortly afterwards in Entourage and vice versa. In iCal, you end up with a new calendar with all your events in it, which is marginally less useful if you keep lots of different categories together, since iCal won't distinguish between them.

Another result of syncing your calendar is that you end up getting two reminders for events instead of one, which could be seen as a plus or a minus depending upon how absent-minded you are.