While I realize that WOULD work, it seems silly to have to go to such
lengths for a user to change comprehensively the way that he works.
I have work and personal as separate identities for various reasons and it
certainly is time consuming and frustrating to have to close apps to switch
identities.
A simple preference checkbox to "not use autocomplete for addresses, etc" in
Office apps other than Entourage would be simple to implement and solve the
problem. At least empower the customer to decide if they want that useless
integration.
I guess I'm asking too much. After all, it isn't about what the customer
wants, it's about what Microsoft THINKS the customer should want. <eyeroll>
No it isn't. It's to prevent the user from totally screwing up Office,
corrupting databases, crashing all the apps, and then blaming Microsoft.
<eyeroll>
For every one person who took the option and knew what they were doing,
there would be 100 who took the option to save the trouble when switching
identities, and then didn't understand why Mail Merge didn't work. The very
fact that you call it "useless integration" demonstrates that you don't know
too much about how Office is used in the real world. You can have no idea
how much flak there was in these newsgroups when Office 2001 was released
with Mail Merge (Data Merge in Word) in an unfinished state without the
ability to filter on categories. It was the single greatest complaint for
Office Mac. having got it working properly in Office X and 2004, MacBU is
not going to shoot themselves - and the large number of users who depend on
this feature - in the foot, just to save you a bit of trouble in switching
identities. I expect that they've done their homework and discovered that
there are far more Office users depending on Mail Merge and other
inter-Office reliance on contacts than users who have more than one
Entourage identity. If it were the other way around, I expect they'd do it
your way. Very few people have more than one Entourage identity.
I already pointed out that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint also have the user's
name and company built into File/Properties. Again, this is probably
something you personally don't care about, but a lot of people and
companies, on both Mac and Windows, depend on those being in place when
exchanging documents. That, too, would have to go.
Maybe some day, they'll invent "Fast Identity Switching" to let you open
more than one identity and have Word, Excel, PPT switch along with
Entourage. That would be nice, but would probably be pretty complicated to
implement. If I'm wrong and lots of people would like this, you should all
request it via Help/Send Feedback. If enough people would like this, it
would raise the priority for implementation over things that are now
considered more important for the developer and tester man-hours involved.
In the meantime, doing what Matt and Corentin suggest will let you do it.
Fast user switching is really easy. To start you off, just copy your "Office
2004 Identities" subfolder of the Microsoft User Data folder to
/Users/Shared User/ and then to the MUD folder of a new OS X user (after
launching and quitting Entourage there once). That will replicate your two
(or more) identities to the other Os X user. Switch to the user you want
there. You can then delete your regular identity there, if you want, and the
alternate one here (main user) if you want. Or not. It's your option. (Nice
of Apple and Microsoft to allow you that option, no? <Eyeroll>)
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <
http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>
Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.
PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
ne user account" system,