Today's tip is courtesy of an Entourage user. Bruce sent this tip to me saying I found a script today which I think deserves mention ...I used it once and it does what it says it will do. I am running Entourage 2008 and Leopard. I have been looking for something like this for a long time to make it easier to sync my "Cell Phone" category contacts with my phone using iSync.
Sync Entourage & AB Groups (donationware) will sync categories in Entourage with groups in Address Book.
Description: Microsoft has recently added sync support for contacts in Entourage and Address Book. This is great news but the sync isn't complete. When syncing from Entourage to Address Book, Entourage's category designations are not matched to Address Book's groups. Also, the "me card" designated in Entourage is transferred to Address Book but the "my card" flag in not. This script resolves these issues. It will go through your contacts in Entourage, determine the name of the categories to which they are assigned and will place the same contacts in Address Book in matching groups (it will create the groups if they do not already exist). The script will also set the "my card" flag for your contact.
To use the script, place the script in the User's script folder ("~/Library/Scripts") or the Entourage Script Menu Items folder ("~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items"). To show the Script menu icon in the menu bar, open the AppleScript Utility in Applications/AppleScript folder. Check "Show Script menu in menu bar."
Thanks to both Bruce for contributing the tip, and to the script author, Jon Nathan for providing a useful script for Entourage users. If you have a useful tip, please send them via comments or you can email me.
Comments (8)
Hi
Is is possible to sync categories from Address Book to Entourage (the script you describe above seems to do only from Entourage to Address Book)?
Regards
Pierre Hunter
Sorry the script only goes one way.
Does this work for Entourage in Office 2004 also?
Yes! When in doubt you can always check the requirements for a script. There are some scripts that will not work in Leopard. this script goes back to 10.3+.
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3+, Microsoft Entourage & Address Book
Where is no written documentation if you double click to open a script in the Script Editor, often the author will put instructions in the script.
I guess I'm doing something wrong. I have the script showing up in Entourage. It even acts like it is working. However, it appears nothing is happening. I have a group in Address Book, and a category in Entourage, both named salesforce.com. I assigned the category to a contact in Entourage, but it is not showing up in the identical group in Address Book.
Entourage categories and Address Book groups don't marry up. The script should create a group from a category. I'm not sure how that combines with the Address Book group.
If you make one Address Book as the base, then delete other sources and let the base overwrite everything, does that help?
VERY basic question:
how do I run a script?
Place the script in the Script Menu Items folder in the Microsoft User Data folder. Select the script from the Script menu in the Menu bar.
For full details see the AppleScript series:
Previous articles in AppleScripting Entourage: