Things You Hate About Entourage

O

Owen Linzmayer

I've been contracted to write an article about users' pet peeves with
Entourage.

I have a long list of my own personal dislikes, but would like to hear from
other users, too.

What about Entourage drives you crazy on a daily basis? Big items and small
are fair game. User interface flaws, long-standing bugs, or features that
are lacking are all of interest. Whatever you hate about the product, let's
hear it.
 
E

Eva

Can't believe no one has answered this request....

Here are a few serious pet peeves for me:

No "easy" way to do return receipt
Address Book is poorly organized as far as first name, last name
No "Blanket" search, even in Advanced Find, you cannot search the body
AND subject, from field.
And now...in their new update for 2004, they apparently improved some
functions with exchange server, but those of us, who only use local
folders, there is now an annoying little add-on to our folders that
says (On My Computer)

These are just a few for you.
 
J

jamesmcnee

The thing that bugs me most about Entourage is that it isn't Outlook.
I learned Office in a PC environment and when I switched to Mac I was
stupid enough to assume Office would be Office. Sure there are little
hiccups between Word for PC and Word for Mac, Excel, PowerPoint, ...
but when I want to do something in Entourage that I learned in Outlook
like print out address cards or whatever I run into a brick wall.
 
S

scott boettcher

1) No real return receipt for Exchange users.
2) No "out of office" for Exchange users.
3) "On my computer" tags highly annoying to some.
4) If you change the server name (in Exchange) and leave everything else the
same, you lose all the cached emails in Inbox/Sent/Deleted, etc. as well as
Calendar/contact data which all must be rebuilt. Very time-consuming if you
need to move a mail account to a new server.
5) The way the GAL/Address books work seems to confuse almost everyone.


I don¹t want this to sound like a whine-fest, but maybe you can accumulate
the data for a nice ³wish-list² to forward to the MacBU.

SB
 
D

Donald McDaniel

On 11/9/05 12:37 PM, in article
[email protected], "jamesmcnee"

The thing that bugs me the most with Entourage is that I am unable to create
a Customized View setting which will allow me to display ALL Items I have
set a category for at the top of the display, as in Outlook Express.
 
S

Sonya

I have folders that I store emails in. I wish I could view all
sent/received emails in Entourage no matter which folder they are in. I
used to use Lotus Notes and it had a way to do this type of view without
moving anything around.
 
L

leturner

1. The Advanced Find is not the default find
2. Neither find remembers last settings
3. Cannot print mailing labels or other common address relate
templates within the program.

And there is no support to tell you how to do it with Word and Mai
Merge. (Entourage tells you to go ask Word how -but they don't tell yo
where ... "Address labels" returns 19 hits - the useful one is #
"Create labels by using the Data Merge Manager)

The # of steps (approx 15 depending on your "options") and effor
required to set up a MS Word mail merge doc is not a solution, it'
insanely complex for what most people want to do: print labels o
envelopes for a category or name in their address book list - check an
see for yourself - yeah follow those directions without printing the
out I dare ya.

4. The "View: Arrange By: Show in Groups" menu option is on by defaul
in EVERY new account and sub folder you create AND automaticall
applies to EVERY account and sub-folder you import whether you like i
or not. That was SUCH a wonderful surprise when I upgraded from v.X t
2004 with my 6+ accounts and 100+ sub-folders. Can you tell how much
just LOVE those baby blue bars cluttering up my message lists?

5. Another upgrade peeve - the MBU added a nice 3-column vertica
layout preview option: (Kudos on the feature by the way) BUT then stol
the old horizontal preview shortcut keystroke which had been the sam
since Entourage first came out 5 years ago.

Make it mantra people: Never force the user to change they way they d
things just for your "NEW and IMPROVED!" and never, ever screw wit
muscle memory unless it's life and limb.

6. The "leave message on server" option for POP accounts (a sort o
poor-man's IMAP option) became very unreliable with 2004. Message
occasionally disappear from the inbox (sometimes while selecting them!
requiring a "Refresh Message List" action to get them back (an
subsequent reset of all messages to the Unread status).

That'll do for now.

Now if this were about MS Word ... there wouldn't be enough time o
space in all of the internet for contain my loathing ... It is the onl
application I have the misfortune of having to use that will send m
into a seething rage 9 times out of 10 when working with any give
document for more than 30 minutes
 
P

Pitch

1. Its inability to set each folder with its own search criteria field.
Currently, in 2004, If you set the search function (upper right of the
main window) as To... Contains..., then every folder has that. My guess
is that if someone needs to search in the Deleted Items folder, they
rarely would need "To
Contains". They would probably want From Contains. Yet for the Sent
Items, To Contains works perfectly.

So: give us the ability to set the search criteria for at least the
main default folders.

2. Give the option to always show the BCC field.
 
M

Metritype

I just discovered one.

If I have added a name in my address book to a group in my address book
and I later delete that name from the address book, it should
automatically delete from the group.
 
A

AndyO

LINKING SUCKS

Try to link to anything already existing - it takes years and costs
millions of lives.

Andy
 
M

mmmmark

I've never seen this. I leave my messages on the server all the time so I
can download messages to two computers before I remove them from the server.
I wonder if it has to do with your server <shrug>.

-Mark
 
B

boutwell

The fact that it is 5 times as slow as the (Windows) Outlook client o
slower hardware while connecting to an Exchange server (I run it on
Dual 2.0 with 4GB of RAM).

And the search function is PAINFULLY slow! I would give anything i
there was an OSX port of the Lookout add-on :( I work at a weekl
newspaper and I am moving our art department to Windows soley becaus
of how poor Entourage performs. It seriously will take 5-10 minutes t
complete a search for one 6-character keyword in a pool of 1000 e-mails
The same search in Outlook (NOT using Lookout!) on the same accoun
takes about 20 seconds
 
B

Brian Donohue

No option for Top-Posting replies to emails. This is very aggravating.

Bottom-Posting (posting a reply to an email below the original message,
instead of above it) is fine for some people, but many, many people hate it.
I won't go into all the reasons why we like top-posting, but suffice it to
say, they need to give us the choice.
 
O

Owen Linzmayer

Thanks for your comments.

Can't you do a search with multiple criterion if any are met to search
different areas (body, subject, from, etc) of an email?

I guess you mean you don't want to create a search rule with multiple
criterion, but rather, would like a single criteria that says "search
everywhere in a message," is that correct?
 
O

Owen Linzmayer

Entourage grew out of Claris Emailer, so that explains why it's not Outlook.
I haven't used Outlook, but I can understand your frustration at not having
feature-set parity with Outlook, the standard in Windows.
 
O

Owen Linzmayer

We're definitely on the same page.

I can't stand the way Find works.

1. I use Menu Master to reassign Command-F to open Advanced Find instead of
the fewer options find window, so that no longer is an issue for me.

2. The inability for Find to remember your settings is unforgivable. What
also bugs me about Find is that if you start entering a criteria and then
realize that you want to search Message Body, not Subject, your criteria is
deleted when you change the the pop-up menu. This might be understandable if
Entourage remembered what you had entered as the Subject search criteria,
but nope, if you switch back to Subject, it's gone. WTF?!

3. I used to use Dynodex and loved the way I could easily print compact
address books to have as a reference when my computer was off or I was on
the road without my PIM. Entourage has no easy way of getting your address
info into a useful paper format. I had to jump through hoops with mail merge
and Word to cobble together something that barely met my needs.

4. Amen on the default of Show in Groups. What a pain. Likewise, try hiding
a bunch of unwanted columns. There's no way to do it in one fell swoop. You
have to deselected them one at a time, and do it over and over for every
folder. Arg!
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

Funny, all my emails top-post when I hit reply.

Entourage | Preferences | Reply and Forward--under Mail Attribution, the
second and third option both can put the insertion point at the top of the
quoted text. Presumably with the second option you can leave the
attribution line blank if you don't see a use for that information.

Only the "use none" setting there bottom-posts by default.

Seems like quite a lot of choices for prepping replies, actually.
 
O

Owen Linzmayer

I hadn't noticed this.

Several things I hate about the Address Book include:

1. If you choose Copy Name and Address to clipboard, it doesn't include the
Business Name. Huh?

2. Clicking a phone number just makes it bigger. Why not offer the much more
useful option of dialing it with the modem, just as every PIM since 1984
used to do?

3. Contacts without names and only company info filled in are incorrectly
shown in lists. Entourage repeats the company name as the name, too. Same
thing with email addresses without names. Sorting on company doesn¹t sort
the name fields properly either.
 
F

Fonnesbeck, Chris

I've been contracted to write an article about users' pet peeves with
Entourage.

I have a long list of my own personal dislikes, but would like to hear from
other users, too.

What about Entourage drives you crazy on a daily basis? Big items and small
are fair game. User interface flaws, long-standing bugs, or features that
are lacking are all of interest. Whatever you hate about the product, let's
hear it.
Click to expand...

I will preface this by saying that I *like* Entourage, and it is my everyday
email application. However, I dislike the fact that it is stuck in Carbon
when mainstream Mac apps have long ago moved to Cocoa. This means that I
cannot customize the toolbar, I cannot use many Cocoa services, and it is
slow.

Entourage in general (and Office) has to become a Tiger app as soon as
possible. This means spotlight integration, for starters.

Also, I do not use MS Messenger. Some diversity on messaging options would
be nice. At least in iChat I have the option of using Jabber.

C.
 
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