Entourage GTD: Quick Projects
April 29th, 2007 by Adam Sneller
I’ve always liked the idea of the Entourage Project Center. It lets you create a Project which can then be linked to email, notes, contacts, or just about anything else in your system. It even creates special “watch folders” to hold your project files. You can set Project deadlines and track your progress through a series of panels and custom views. And if you are clever with Applescript, you can generate activity reports that answer the question “So what’s the status on this?” (More on that later).
But the system has an Achilles Heal, and it’s a big one. In order to actually create a project, the user is forced to work through a series of 4 screens worth of hair-pulling Q&A in the Entourage Project Wizard - each of which, with multiple options! Now if you only ever plan to create 3 projects in your life, this is no big deal. But if your workflow is based on something more dynamic (say GTD, for example), this just doesn’t work.
I present you with two options. You can take the Blue Pill, launch your computer out that 3-story window you’ve been eyeing, and go back to paper. Or you can take the Red Pill and download this nifty applescript, which lets you create a project at the touch of a button… hmm.
Installation
- Download and extract the file: Quick Project Script
- Navigate to the Entourage Script Menu Items folder. This can be found at: ‘~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items/’ (the “~” is Unix shorthand for your “home” folder).
- Save the script to this folder and you’re done.
Note:
If you don’t already use Applescript with Entourage, I recommend a fresh start. Create a copy of the ‘Entourage Script Menu Items’ folder and rename this ‘Entourage Script Menu Items (Old)’. Next, double-click the ‘Entourage Script Menu Items’ folder and delete all its contents, except for the ‘About this Menu’ script and (of course) your ‘Quick Project\cR’ script.
Re-launch Entourage and your Scripts menu should look like this:
Usage:
Of course you can mouse over to your Scripts Menu and click the ‘Quick Project’ item. But even better, just hit Ctrl-R (that’s what the ‘\cR’ part of the filename is for… aaaha).
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June 18th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
When I use this script, I get the following: “Microsoft Entourage got an error: Can’t get some object.” The script does produce a new project however as it should.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Steve - thanks for catching this! It looks like there was some extra code in there, left over from a previous version (oops). I updated the script, so if you try and download it again everything should work fine.
Best,
-Adam
December 27th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Thanks for the script. I love it. I was having a hard time with the Project Centre but I can see me using it a little more now. Bravo.
March 1st, 2008 at 6:42 am
Thanks!
I’m used to have my project folders at a place difference than ‘Documents/Office Projects’
How can I change this within this script?
March 6th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Sjoerd - the QuickProject script does not control where Entourage saves its project files (this is specified internally by the application).
One thing you might try is to create an alias to the “Office Projects” folder (control-clicking the folder from within Finder will give you this option). You can then rename the alias to whatever you want and move it to the desired location. For example, I have an alias on my desktop, titled “Projects”, which links through to my “Office Projects” folder in “/adam/Documents”.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
This is a fantastic script! I was resistant to using projects because of that lame wizard and now it;s a snap. Is there any way to have the script not create a mail folder? I always delete them manually. I used to write a lot of VB Script; there is a huge MS reference for the objects you can access from MS Office- can you point me in the direction of the same for Entourage and Applescript, so I can contribute?
Thanks!
-Abdul
June 28th, 2008 at 11:05 am
This is a fairly contained project, so I can just post the code here for you to take a look at. Here is the original version that is available for download:
(*
Quick Project
Created by Adam Sneller on 9/5/2006.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
*)
-- get new project name from dialog
set prjName to text returned of (display dialog "Name:" with title "Quick Project" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "Create"} default button "Create")
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
-- create project
try
set theProject to make new project with properties {name:prjName, has due date:false}
on error
display dialog "Project name must be unique!" with icon 1
return
end try
end tell
By default, Entourage creates the email folder for you and assigns a random color to the project (lookup “Project” in the Entourage appleScript dictionary). But you can override this with something like:
set theProject to make new project with properties {name:prjName, has due date:false, color:{0, 0, 0}}
And then to get rid of the project email folder:
set projectName to name of theProject
delete (first folder whose name is projectName)
The finished code then looks like this:
(*
Quick Project
Created by Adam Sneller on 9/5/2006.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
*)
-- get new project name from dialog
set prjName to text returned of (display dialog "Name:" with title "Quick Project" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "Create"} default button "Create")
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
-- create project
try
set theProject to make new project with properties {name:prjName, has due date:false, color:{0, 0, 0}}
on error
display dialog "Project name must be unique!" with icon 1
return
end try
-- remove project email folder
set projectName to name of theProject
delete (first folder whose name is projectName)
end tell
Copy and paste the above code into Script Editor and save the file. If you want to start writing your own scripts, the best book out there is “AppleScript the Definitive Guide.” by Matt Neuburg. Also, you should check out the ScriptBuilders section of macscripter.com. They have a lot of free code you can download, which is a great way to learn.
Hope this helps!
-Adam
June 29th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Adam,
That helps a lot! I modified my script and it works perfectly. I made a huge discovery in writing Applescript- dictionaries! Things are much easier now
One last question, why use “set theProject to make new project” when you can just “make new project”? Does “theProject” become an object or a variable? How / when would you reference it again?
Thanks!
Abdul
June 29th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Abdul,
You are absolutely right. I didn’t realize that I had already created a reference to the project name in the “prjName” variable. This is needed so that you can later tell Entourage which email folder to delete.
Here is a revised version:
(*
Quick Project
Created by Adam Sneller on 9/5/2006.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
*)
-- get new project name from dialog
set prjName to text returned of (display dialog "Name:" with title "Quick Project" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "Create"} default button "Create")
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
-- create project
try
make new project with properties {name:prjName, has due date:false, color:{0, 0, 0}}
on error
display dialog "Project name must be unique!" with icon 1
return
end try
-- remove project email folder
delete (first folder whose name is prjName)
end tell
Good luck!
-Adam