Email Woes May 20, 2004
Posted by Owen in : Weird , trackbackI wanted to transfer my email, contacts, and calendar from Outlook on the PC to Entourage on the Mac. No problem, I’m sure there’s an import button. Nope. Entourage doesn’t support importing from Microsoft’s very own PC version! Good God! For example, Outlook can export address book entries, IF you are willing to right click on each, select export, and choose a location. There’s no bulk export utility! No problem, I can get a 3rd party software to do it. No go.
But OK, by searching the Internet I find OK ways to export all the data. For example, I can import using Outlook Express on the PC then copy the files to the Mac and use Apple’s importer. I decided I’ll be rid of Microsoft software and use Mail.app, iCal, and Address Book. But all the programs have problems that bug me. They’re good, but not good enough. Mail.app is a real great program, but just doesn’t have the organizational tools I need. Address Book is fine, but the interface is irritating. It’s too hard to do easy stuff. iCal is nice: looks great, easy to use, full featured, light weight, but the reminder feature doesn’t work well. If you set a reminder for a date that has already passed (let’s say you have a meeting tomorrow and you want a reminder and you set it to remind you 1 day in advance, but it’s only 23 hours away: no reminder). I could easily live with these minor issues, but it turns out Entourage solves most of them.
Now Entourage (besides being hard to spell), is slow and bloated (takes 2% of the CPU when idle–more than the Finder!), but it has all the features I like from Outlook: 3 vertical pane email (once you use it, you’ll never go back), virtual folders, fast email display, good reminders, nice integration with all PIM functions, etc. Of course, there’s still a problem: there’s no way at all to import calendar entries. Sigh. Can’t win.
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