When Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac, they did something that I must applaud -- they joined the ranks of Mac developers creating Automator-able applications. When you do a search in Automator for "Microsoft," it will reveal all of the Automator actions that ship with Microsoft Office 2008. There is lots of great stuff included, so we'll be covering some of it in this four part Mac Automation series. I will take you through how to automate each of the Microsoft Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage.First off, let's take a look at what you can automate in Word 2008. Doing a search for "Word" in Automator will display the available actions for Microsoft Word. As you can see, there are plenty of actions that you can automate. For this how-to, we'll focus on a workflow that does the following:
- Creates a new document
- Sets document properties
- Gathers text from the clipboard
- Places a watermark in the document
- Saves the document
- Prints the document
Archiving your Entourage mail is a chore that varies in ease and effectiveness, depending on how much time and tweaking energy you're willing to put into it. You can drag messages to Finder folders to export them, or pull out entire folders as MBOX files; you can also export folder sets to Entourage's 
If you've got a 
No, this won't be another post where I explain my reasons for loving and ordering the 
Office 2008 for the Mac is a 
Microsoft has been ramping up the hype machine for the coming release of Office for the Mac 2008. They've set up a 
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but personally I'd nominate frustration instead. Lots of the time, the things you need to do, or think you need to do (get more exercise, pay your taxes) get pushed off or procrastinated into irrelevancy, but the things that frustrate you -- even if they're below the radar -- will drive you to the point of saying "I'm going to fix this @!#*& problem no matter what it takes!" Inventions motivated by frustration tend to be quick hacks that provide at least a momentary sense of achievement, if nothing more.
Happy Friday everyone! From Down Under it emerges (via 
Are you a Mac user living in an Exchange world, forced to trudge through Entourage? (Don't get me wrong: Entourage is fine, but 'trudge' is just a good verb for dramatic effect.) Well trudge no longer with 
MacTech has
published what I am fairly certain are the comprehensive 
I don't know how long
this secret affair has been going on, but apparently 
Good news for
you Entourage users: included in 
