Switching from MS Outlook to Entourage w/a Mac

H

Hans Castorp

I am a Win XP user and have been for eons. I am thinking about migrating my
computers to Apple products. However, I would use MS software for Macs.
Additionally I use Outlook 2002. I gave Entourage a brief test drive, but
it was hardly rigorous and would appreciate any thoughts or help from those
who have made the swith and are happy as well as those who are not happy
using Entourage.

Many thanks in advance.

Alan
 
J

Joseph Havrilla

Alan,

I just made the same switch. Clearly MS could make it easier and is
choosing not to. Fair? Don't know, don't care really, as all it served to
do was to make me learn more about my Mac even faster.

My biggest gripe is the lack of a tool to ease the conversion from Outlook.
It has been a real pain and I still do not have my Contacts moved yet. It
has been particularly difficult for me for a few reasons: like the fact that
I have pst archive files that go back many years which have several layers
of foldering within them, and that I had about a dozen different contact
folders. If you are an organized packrat you will pay the price :). If
you keep all of your stuff in one flat mail file and one contacts list, the
conversion won't be too bad.

Best answers that I've found so far:

- Install Mozilla on XP and import Outlook mail, then convert to Entourage

- Use the send vCard thing for contacts

Any Google search will give you the details ...

Other than conversion to Entourage, it has gone pretty well. I have a few
Excel spreadsheets with VBA macros that I wrote that no longer work. To be
honest though, I haven't dug into it to figure out what the problem is.

All that said, I really needed a change/challenge and was so impressed with
the nano that I decided to give Apple a shot. Having had considerable Unix
experience from the past, my angst about "making it do what I want" was
lessened. When I think of all the "tweaking" that I've had to do over the
years to get MS to work properly, this switch seems miniscule (in terms of
pain) so far. I heartily recommend that you proceed, albeit with your eyes
open.

Good luck!


Joe
 
H

Hans Castorp

Joe,

Thank you for taking the time to reply. What do you mean send the v-card
thing for contacts?
Alan
 
J

Joe Havrilla

Alan,

Sorry for taking so long to respond ... was on the road. I was referring to
the ability to select contacts in Outlook, then (either tools or actions
menu?) "Send as vCard."

One thing I found that I couldn't find documented anywhere. If you have any
groups defined and you select them along with basic contacts, you won't see
an option to send vCards. Just deselect the groups and it'll work fine.

Then just send them to yourself and open the e-mail in Entourage, save as
attachments, then drag the attachments from the Finder window into the
Entourage contacts folder.

Hope that helps,


Joe
 
J

Julia

I had a similar situation recently, when I left my job (where I used
Outlook) and wanted to transfer my contacts to Entourage, which I use on
my iBook G4 at home. I opened each contact I wanted to save and selected
"Forward as vCard" in the (is it Actions?) menu in Outlook, then
addressed the resulting e-mail to my own gMail account. About half of
the messages came through just fine with vCard attachments, which I was
able to import into Entourage with no trouble. The rest, though, had a
winmail.dat attachment instead of the vCard. There was no alternating
back and forth with the 2 types; the first 20 or so I sent came through
as vCards, and the rest as winmail.dat attachments.

Any chance of recovering these, or any suggestions about what I might
have done wrong?

Julia
 
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