Open Comments About Entourage?

S

Sparrowhawk

Registered
Greetings All,
I'm new to owning a Mac (and eMac) and while I intensely dislike Microsoft, perforce I have to use MS Word for Mac. Since I have the Office for Mac, the program Entourage seems useful, but am nervous about using it exclusively for mail and other functions, given its source. One advantage that Entourage mail has over Mac is its ability to let you know how long an uploading of an email message, particularly one with an attachment, takes, a serious flaw of ommission with Mac. I would be interested in hearing Mac users' take and experience in using Entourage. Do you use it, do you trust it, is it more trouble than its worth, and so forth. Also, I've noticed that the book "Office for Mac" is about 3 years old, so I've been wondering if this book is outdated or if any users out there find it useful in learning how to use programs like Entourage and Word (beyond basic functions, that is). I'm also interested in the Project Center program, and if anyone finds this program useful as well.
Much thanks for your time.
Sparrowhawk
 
I own a copy of Microsoft Office and would never consider using Entourage for my email. For me, it offers no real advantages over Apple Mail, and quite a few minor annoyances when it comes to things like upgrading your system and migrating from one machine to another.

One advantage that Entourage mail has over Mac is its ability to let you know how long an uploading of an email message, particularly one with an attachment, takes, a serious flaw of ommission with Mac.
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I don't find this a compelling argument. As of Tiger, as you compose a message in Mail you can now see the size of the message (in bytes, KB, MB) on the status bar at the bottom of the message window. This way, you're able to make an educated decision about whether a message is going to take too long or be too big for a recipient on a dial-up connection. There is also a drop down there that lets you resize all the images in your message with a single click. Very handy.

In this day and age when most users will simply leave Mail.app open, and will likely have a broadband connection to the Internet, there is little need to worry about how long it will take to talk to the server, as all of this happens in the background and you can still read and write emails while it is doing this.

To me, Entourage offers nothing to justify its bigger memory and CPU footprint, slower launch time, more complex interface and that nagging fear of security problems.
 
Symphonix,
Extremely compelling reasons not to use Entourage's mail function. Special thanks for your observation about message size, and I will make note of that in the future. Do you have any thoughts about the Project Center? As for mail, I think I will be sticking to Apple Mail as my mail program, based on your comments; it does in fact launch much faster, and in general is less complicated. However, one hopes Apple will create some sort of gradation scale for uploading and downloading messages. Thanks! Sparrowhawk
 
The all-one program of Entourage was initially attractive to me. To be honest, I like Outlook, the windows counter-part. Although, the daily use of Entourage, for email, scheduling appointments, and contacts, I found it clumsy to work with when you need a quick visual of your daily schedule, and perhaps read an email or two.

One of the reason I enjoy the Macintosh all together is the beauty in simplicity. Tiger mail is much improved over previous version. I use it primarily and find it adequate to met my needs, as well as Ical.

The project center is something I recently started to use. I created a project for work, and used the project center. In the end, even though my project was not complex, I could have easily done it without project center. The most useful feature of project center was the visual of the time line to meet deadlines, etc. Again, nothing that could have been accomplished without Entourage.

In short, although Entourage in philosophy may be a good idea, in practical use, I found it cumbersome to use and accomplish tasks.
 
Thanks for your imput about Entourage's Project Center. Like you, I thought it a nice idea, but you're probably right: taking the time to learn to use Project Center would absorb as much time as actually putting a project together using Mac's already built-in programs. While I'll investigate Project Center more when I get some literature on it, it sounds like the only thing I'll really need from the Office suite is MS Word.
 
Sparrowhawk said:
Thanks for your imput about Entourage's Project Center. Like you, I thought it a nice idea, but you're probably right: taking the time to learn to use Project Center would absorb as much time as actually putting a project together using Mac's already built-in programs. While I'll investigate Project Center more when I get some literature on it, it sounds like the only thing I'll really need from the Office suite is MS Word.
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Whether you realize it or not, you hit a fundamental problem with Entourage, especially the Project Center. A facility that requires you to take time to figure out basic functionality is badly thought out. But, Entourage has a lot of bad ideas. The worst is that its mail filter hides certain messages, making them inaccessible within Entourage. The Help file gives no hint how to disable this behavior. However, the same mail gets through via Mail. Mail always leaves the user in charge. If I didn't use Mail in parallel with Entourage, I would lose some very important messages.
 
I have tried Entourage and I don't find it particularly better in any way that Apple's Mail, the size and time thing doesn't worry me, I still have dial-up but I can judge from the Kb, Mb or Gb how long it is going to take. Also, I don't use Mail any more because you can't HTML very easily. I use Mozilla Thunderbird (which is a lot like Mail anyway).
 
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