Earth 2 Adam

Behold… the Entourage Calendar! It’s not fancy (and it can be a little clunky), but this baby interfaces with Exchange Server, it lets you sort and filter with custom views, and you can link its events to any other element in Entourage. Did I mention that it interfaces with Exchange???

One area where the calendar falls short, is that doesn’t give you a consistent way to move events around. Sure, you can drag & drop events from timeblock to timeblock. But if you were to drag a time-specific event up to the All-day Events section (for example), just sit back and watch the epileptic fit that follows! The reverse operation is no better (in this instance, the event disappears from the calendar all-together). In fact, the only way Entourage allows you to complete this maneuver is by first opening the event for editing and then toggling the “All-day event” checkbox with your mouse.

Fortunately, Entourage packs one mean AppleScript dictionary. And it is here that we find the tools necessary to un-clunkify our Calendar experience.

The Fix

I present you with two simple AppleScripts. The first one lets you select an all-day event and send it to the calendar. The second one (no surprise) lets you send it back. Match these with a couple of custom keyboard shortcuts (I suggest ⌘↑ and ⌘↓) and you will be on your way to removing your fingers of that annoying point-and-click device and returning them to keyboard where they belong!

Requirements

These scripts are built to run on OS 10.4 Tiger with Entourage 2004. If you are running OS 10.3, please download the Calendar Scripts (Panther Edition) instead. Then continue with Step 2 of the Installation (below).

Installation

1. Download and extract the files: Calendar Scripts
2. Remove the scripts from their folder and move these to the “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items” folder (”~” is shorthand for your “home” folder).
3. Close Entourage and open the System Preferences panel (you can find this in your Applications folder).
4. Follow the instructions found here for adding keyboard shortcuts to your scripts. I suggest assigning “Move to All Day Events” and “Move to Calendar” to ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ respectively.
5. Restart Entourage.

Usage

1. Open the entourage calendar and highlight an all-day event (or scheduled event)
2. Navigate to the Scripts Menu (or even better) use your newly-created keyboard shortcuts: ⌘↑ and ⌘↓

Notes

I would like to thank Michael Day for bringing this bug to my attention and requesting the fix. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Entourage GTD, AppleScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. |  Print This Post

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