[asodamiac]

Well, my software came before my Mac, so I have a quick question. I have both iWork '05 and Microsoft Office 2004 Pro edition. I wanted Office for Word (heard Pages wasn't that great) but wanted iWork for Keynote. Should I just install Word and Excel and use Keynote? Or should I just install all of Office 2004?

[kcmac]

The only one I don't use is Entourage.

If you are in the corporate/biz world, it is a little difficult to avoid Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Keynote is much improved but going back and forth you will find that some things just won't work. I prefer to use Keynote. Just don't expect that the cool transitions and transparencies will work on the PC side.

I use Pages to clean up styles in important Word documents as well as to write in general. However, I rely on Word when people get the notion that they have to use Track Changes or other crazy things.

Mail rules over Entourage. Tiger Mail will be even better.

So far, nothing really touches Excel. Thankfully, I don't do spreadsheets that often anyway.

[asodamiac]

well, im just a student. guess i'll just install all but entourage. do you have any experiences with VPC? i doubt i will need it (unless i REALLY REALLY want to play a video game thats not out for macs). does it take a lot to just run VPC? specs of my pb in my sig. thanks.

[plasticman]

I use pages for wordprocessing, keynote for presentations, and NeoOffice for spreadsheets. Luckily, I don't use spreadsheets very often, and my requirements for them are very limited. There are some conversion changes that are obvious, but these are rare

[Superchicken]

Give Pages a decent shake. It's not bad. Though having word for when your PC friends send you just is a good thing. I personally bought iWork because I was sick of using TextEdit for papers, and Pages has been great for it. Actually I leave the styles drawer open and it works great, all my papers are formatted the exact way I like em. The only bug I've found is one thing to do with words like Baha'i that for some reason Pages doesn't seem to be willing to learn if they have an apostrophe. Or even ignore. Which is weird since it's supposed to use OS X's built in text setup... I dono... I think after school's done I'll try just re-installing it.

[asodamiac]

i heard that pages was.. hmm.. wasnt up to par with word. is this true? some people even mentioned that pages was missing very basic things such as spell/grammar check (that or it lacked in some sort of way.. not sure where i read this). well since i already have office, i might as well use word. keynote seems awesome though.

[Superchicken]

Pages has no grammar check... but I hardly feel my regular grammar is to awful. That said I prefer it's spell check since it uses the overall OS X spell check, so if Safari has learned a word Pages should know it too.

[asodamiac]

grammar check would be nice though, especially when youre writing papers.

[kcmac]

I wouldn't think of relying on grammar check in word. Instant doom.

Virtual PC is not something I would bother with. If you find you really need to use apps found only on the PC, either borrow a roomate or friends machine or get a cheap one.

Pages doesn't have a lot of features that Word has but what does? Word can't hold a candle to styles and the ease of setting up your document just the way you want. Creating your own template is a snap. Even though Pages is fairly intuitive, I highly suggest giving the manual a once over. You will be amazed at what it can do.

I always keep the styles drawer open as well and show invisibles. Makes it easier to delete things and to see what you are doing.

[asodamiac]

well.. i have office 2004 pro. it comes with VPC. i can choose to install or not install right? just wondering if i needed it.. thanks.

[kcmac]

You can choose to install or not.

[eggman]

Why do you assert "Mail rules over Entourage"? I can only think of one advantage: Mail stores messages seperately... rather than using the database file approach of Entourage. This means that Mail isn't susceptible to a potential database corrupton that would destroy your files.

But then again, I back up my mail on a nightly basis... so that's not so much of a concern. Functionally I think that Entourage blows the doors off Mail, especially Entourage 2004. Prior versions suffered from inexplicably high use of CPU when viewing HTML mail... but that's been fixed. The filtering rules are robust, and the mailing list tools are as well. Their junk filtering works very well, too. I used to use SpamSieve - I don't have to anymore.

Entourage already has "smart" groupings of messages... which Mail will only be getting with Tiger. Entourage allows the specification of color-coded categories (like labels) which is missing from Mail. And Entourage allows linking notes, tasks, email messages and calendar events. Mail doesn't even provide most of those alternatives, nonetheless provide easy links between them.

I just don't see that there's a cut-and-dried argument to be made for Mail being clearly superior to Entourage. In terms of features, Entourage has the edge.

The one thing that I wish Entourage would have... which Mail will have under Tiger, is Searchlight compatibility. My understanding is that since Searchlight provides file-level indexing, it will not be possible for Entourage mail to be indexed in Spotlight correctly because all the messages reside in one database file.

[asodamiac]

now im torn between entourage and mail . as for saving/storing e-mails, i'm just a student and dont really have "important" e-mails that i need to save. the only e-mails i do actually save are receipts from online purchases or homework that i send to myself in case my computer acts up. other than that, i rarely e-mail people.

i currently use gmail and its just what i need. there are a few things i dislike about it, but i can live with it. i wish my pb would show up soon. i think it would be easier to make decisions like these if i actually used each program in person.

[kcmac]

So my opinion varies from yours. What's wrong with that? I think Entourage is ugly with a busy UI, does not play well with addressbook, has a suspect storage system, will be behind Tiger Mail's smart folders, and I could go on.

I quit using it long ago and don't ever plan to go back. It's okay that you like Entourage. I don't.

Try both. I think most Mac users would stick with Mail.

[eggman]

There's nothing wrong with dissent. I'm a great fan of it. And believe me... there's not a rarer sight than me defending a Microsoft product. But I did want to hear your reasoning. Maybe I'd even learn something about Mail I was unaware of.

I agree that it's a shame that Entourage doesn't use Apple's Address Book... and I wish that weren't the case. OTOH, Entourage... having been available for OS 9 for years did precede Address Book, so it would have probably been a real bear to switch over.

Word also doesn't use Address Book... and Word and Entourage share their own contact database... and if you ever need to include your contact's address in Word, that would give an edge to Entourage. But as I said, it would be great if all Mac apps used the same contact management database.

To be fair, if you quit using Entouirage a long ago, you may not have seen some of the improvements and refinements that arrived with Office 2004. But you are correct about a majority of Mac users sticking with Mail, it is free... and probably meets the needs of most OS X users... so why should they switch? OTOH, I've used Entourage for years and years... and I've never been stung by problems with its database... and have never seen a reason to switch to a less fully featured mail client.

Personally, I like the fact that there are at least two decent and common mail clients for OS X. It's good to have competition. I'm really bummed out about the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia because I think it'll be bad for innovation.

[asodamiac]

guess i'll just have to try them out for myself.

[crouchingtiger]

Keynote is fantastic, except for a few pretty glaring clunky things (only able to have one bulleted list/slide, for instance). And I don't even use fancy transitions or templates or anything. The million-dollar-feature that saves me an infinite amount of time when putting together a presentation is the native PDF support. In other words, I can cut and paste directly from Illustrator into Keynote and have it be perfectly sharp, scalable, etc.
I have to say that overall I still feel like the interface for Keynote needs work. Font/Color/Inspector floating windows are pretty annoying to work with. Keynote 2.0 added some welcome animation features, however.

[bbales]

Originally Posted by eggman

Why do you assert "Mail rules over Entourage"? I can only think of one advantage: Mail stores messages seperately... rather than using the database file approach of Entourage. This means that Mail isn't susceptible to a potential database corrupton that would destroy your files.

But then again, I back up my mail on a nightly basis... so that's not so much of a concern. Functionally I think that Entourage blows the doors off Mail, especially Entourage 2004. Prior versions suffered from inexplicably high use of CPU when viewing HTML mail... but that's been fixed. The filtering rules are robust, and the mailing list tools are as well. Their junk filtering works very well, too. I used to use SpamSieve - I don't have to anymore.

Entourage already has "smart" groupings of messages... which Mail will only be getting with Tiger. Entourage allows the specification of color-coded categories (like labels) which is missing from Mail. And Entourage allows linking notes, tasks, email messages and calendar events. Mail doesn't even provide most of those alternatives, nonetheless provide easy links between them.

I just don't see that there's a cut-and-dried argument to be made for Mail being clearly superior to Entourage. In terms of features, Entourage has the edge.

The one thing that I wish Entourage would have... which Mail will have under Tiger, is Searchlight compatibility. My understanding is that since Searchlight provides file-level indexing, it will not be possible for Entourage mail to be indexed in Spotlight correctly because all the messages reside in one database file.

I've been using Entourage since 10.1. Mail then was pretty lame. HOWEVER -- I've been playing around with Mail a bit more and plan to do a really serious comparison when Tiger comes out.

My biggest complaint with any program is something that might not be possible. I want to be able to read and write mail from both my laptop and desktop, and be able to easily keep the two in sync. Right now I can READ in both places, but if I send a response, it's only going to show up on the machine from which I write it. (At least, if it's not the way, I haven't figured that out yet.)

It will be an interesting slugfest...

[Superchicken]

Try Unison... I heard about it and it looks freaking sweet...

I'll be using it if I ever get a desktop that I want to keep in sync with.

That said, I tried entourage once... not much though, I find Mail to be a real treat... not to mention I like using address book since it syncs with my iPod.

[threestain]

Mail is brilliant for me, but then I look at Entourage, and completely baulk at the hideous complications. Would be nice for everything to work like it does, but I find iCal, Mail and Addressbook are much much better overall. Less bloat more finely finished beast!

[tooki]

Originally Posted by bbales

My biggest complaint with any program is something that might not be possible. I want to be able to read and write mail from both my laptop and desktop, and be able to easily keep the two in sync. Right now I can READ in both places, but if I send a response, it's only going to show up on the machine from which I write it. (At least, if it's not the way, I haven't figured that out yet.)

You are a poster child for IMAP. You set up your email programs on both ends to use the same folders on your IMAP server (inbox, drafts, sent, and trash, plus any others you may have defined on your own). So for example, you make sure that they both use the same Sent folder. Then, when you send an email, it is both sent to the recipient and saved into the IMAP Sent folder.

I use this, and believe me it works well.

You cannot do this with POP servers -- they don't allow message uploads.

tooki

[bbales]

Originally Posted by tooki

You are a poster child for IMAP. You set up your email programs on both ends to use the same folders on your IMAP server (inbox, drafts, sent, and trash, plus any others you may have defined on your own). So for example, you make sure that they both use the same Sent folder. Then, when you send an email, it is both sent to the recipient and saved into the IMAP Sent folder.

I use this, and believe me it works well.

You cannot do this with POP servers -- they don't allow message uploads.

tooki

Unfortunately, my main e-mail account is POP. Is .mac mail IMAP? I'm under the impression that it is -- so I tried out seeing if "sent" mail showed up in both spots. It did not -- but I am also fairly certain it's not set up exactly correctly. That's why I want to play around some more. It would simplify my life incredible. Right now, for example, I'm on my laptop, but I'm soon going to return to my basement office and my desktop. Much easier to be able to do e-mail in both spots.

[asodamiac]

Originally Posted by bbales

Unfortunately, my main e-mail account is POP. Is .mac mail IMAP? I'm under the impression that it is -- so I tried out seeing if "sent" mail showed up in both spots. It did not -- but I am also fairly certain it's not set up exactly correctly. That's why I want to play around some more. It would simplify my life incredible. Right now, for example, I'm on my laptop, but I'm soon going to return to my basement office and my desktop. Much easier to be able to do e-mail in both spots.

well im not sure which email service you use, but if you use gmail, heres how to set up mail with a gmail account:

http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/...y?answer=13275

[bbales]

Originally Posted by tooki

You are a poster child for IMAP. You set up your email programs on both ends to use the same folders on your IMAP server (inbox, drafts, sent, and trash, plus any others you may have defined on your own). So for example, you make sure that they both use the same Sent folder. Then, when you send an email, it is both sent to the recipient and saved into the IMAP Sent folder.

I use this, and believe me it works well.

You cannot do this with POP servers -- they don't allow message uploads.

tooki

Another question -- I'm looking further into this, in terms of setting everything up. Does that mean all your mail always stays on the server? That's a concern from a size standpoint. As I said, I'm trying to get everything figured out. (And hoping the new Mail somehow makes this easier!)

[tooki]

Yes, the only way IMAP can work is to store the mail centrally (though most mail clients are smart enough to cache messages so they don't have to be re-downloaded once you've seen them once). So yes, it is important to have a mail account with enough storage. What many people do is archive old mail offline, and just keep the most recent year (for example) on the server.

.mac definitely supports IMAP, and in fact, Mail.app's automatic setup for .mac accounts sets it to use IMAP.

Any problems you've had are either a problem with the mail server, or client misconfiguration. I can assure you that IMAP is capable of working exactly as you desire, because that is precisely how I use my email. In any IMAP client, somewhere in the account setup you can select what server folders to use to store drafts and sent messages. (I find Mail.app to be a tad tricky to set up; I prefer Entourage for IMAP. In Mail.app, to store drafts/sent messages on the server, you have to go into Preferences/Accounts/Special Mailboxes and check the appropriate checkboxes.)

tooki

[naphtali]

Originally Posted by bbales

Another question -- I'm looking further into this, in terms of setting everything up. Does that mean all your mail always stays on the server? That's a concern from a size standpoint. As I said, I'm trying to get everything figured out. (And hoping the new Mail somehow makes this easier!)

You can choose to keep some of your older emails offline as well.

If you look at the drawer with all your mailboxes and folders, clicking on the '+' at the bottom allows you to create a new mailbox.

From there, you can specify it's location - On My Mac or [emailaddress]. As its name suggests, if you choose the first option, all its contents will be stored offline.

At any point in time, you can drag your older emails from the server-synced folders to that offline folder for storage so you don't use that much space. Remember to back up those folders before you format though.



Just for giggles, I decided to experiment with my .Mac account at the start of the year and switched from POP to IMAP.

I was extremely impressed with its convenience - I can have all my mail and folder hierarchy accessible and replicated on the webmail interface and on my PC (running Outlook). It's pretty cool! Backups are simpler and faster too, since I need not worry about which mail folder to save and restore; I just launch Mail and let it download all my folders, emails and attachments.

A possible downside to this convenience is that you may forget to backup whatever offline folders you may set, so do keep that in mind.

As for storage concerns, I've left all of my mail on .Mac servers since perhaps the start of the year and I've used up only 21MB. Your usage patterns may vary of course, but with careful management this isn't a really huge issue.


I haven't used Entourage for a long time now, sticking with Apple's Mail even when I was running .Mac with POP. Do look out for the issue Tooki raised about the drafts/sent messages. It is not specific to Mail though; Outlook on my PC behaves the same way too. My solution is just to drag it to the appropriate online folder.


Can't wait for Tiger!

[bbales]

Thanks Tooki and naphtali for the great info. I'm definitely going to do some experimenting with this, with the goal of moving completely to the IMAP setup. Unfortunately, my DSL provider, which is where my main e-mail account is from, is POP only. I either have to switch addresses -- a royal pain -- or have all my mail automatically forwarded. That's doable, but a bit of a hassle.

It's great to know that I can get this to work the way I want, though.

I have another dumb question about how to/where does it go/ downloading of older mail for offline use and storage, but I'm going to do a little investigating first. I'm sure there's information in either my "missing manual" book or on apple's sit.e

Thanks again.

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by bbales

Unfortunately, my main e-mail account is POP. Is .mac mail IMAP? I'm under the impression that it is -- so I tried out seeing if "sent" mail showed up in both spots. It did not -- but I am also fairly certain it's not set up exactly correctly.

.Mac's email service is a fully-featured IMAP account.
I've got three machines, and all have access to everything the others do.

[naphtali]

Originally Posted by bbales

I have another dumb question about how to/where does it go/ downloading of older mail for offline use and storage, but I'm going to do a little investigating first. I'm sure there's information in either my "missing manual" book or on apple's sit.e

I haven't had to poke around with offline folders ever since I switched to IMAP but I don't think it's any different from when you download all your messages with POP - i.e. they are stored in /Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MailFolderName.

(If you switch to IMAP you'll also get some folders in the ../Mail folder after your mail gets synced. Unless you have offline folders, you need not back this up as you would with POP, since the file hierarchy will be recreated automatically.)


If you don't have that many emails to store offline, you could consider just exporting (Save As) them individually from Mail - you can save them as RTFd, which basically is a Finder/Explorer-accessible folder with a Rich Text document containing the email text (with formatting), and any attachments. It's pretty spiffy cos the exported file is not tied to any program or OS.


The good thing with IMAP is of course that you can experiment with it and still download it with POP if you don't like it (provided you don't delete the mail haha)

[mitchell_pgh]

I think the real issue with pages is, nobody knows what it is. It's not a full blown word replacement AND it's not a Quark/InDesign replacement. It's somewhere in the middle.

[bbales]

OK, I've done some experiementing with the IMAP setup (and am quite excited about tiger, by the way, for the way it will handle mail).

So far, though, I am finding fault with the web-based interface. I'm used to having all my mailboxes visible, so I can drag messages to the proper location. Unless I'm doing something wrong -- quite possible, of course -- I can see either only my inbox, OR my folders, not both. Is there? I'm wondering if it's possible to -- after I respond to a message and therefore theoretically have a copy of the "sent" message online, to then offload everything to the non-web mailboxes. That sounds like kind of a hassle, though.

In some ways, this is kind of moot. Tiger comes out in a week and things will change at that point. Tookie, you mentioned you use Entourage, which I use, too, but am not sure how you're using Entourage in the IMAP system.

But thanks again so much for the help you've given me already. I know this is the way to go -- I'm just figuring out how to get there!

[andysfl]

unfortunately i have to stick with entourage because i couldnt set up mail to work with my @msn.com email account.

anyone know how i can solve this problem?

[ballpoint]

The ONLY reason that I don't use Mail over Entourage 2004 is that Mail (even version 2 from 10.4) will not let you drag and drop another e-mail as an attachment. Entourage has been able to do this since it's inception.

If Mail could easily attach mail messages as an attachment (using drag & drop) I would drop Entourage in an instant--sure want that spotlight indexing!

CJJ