Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Multiple Identities

If you start singing the praises of multiple identities to your psychotherapist, you’ll definitely get her to sit up and take notice—and probably not in a good way. But make the same comments among a group of Microsoft Office power users and, if you get any response at all, it will come in the form of a knowing nod or an agreeing grunt. When Microsoft refers to multiple identities it’s talking about an Entourage feature that lets several members of a family, school, or work circle use the same program on the same Mac—but maintain independent calendars, email accounts, mailing list info, rules, messages, preferences, signatures, to do lists, address books, and so on.

You’ll find reference to these identities throughout the Office 2008 suite. For example, the currently selected Entourage identity is the source of names for the AutoText feature in Word, as described on Setting up an AutoText entry. (That’s also why you can’t edit or switch identities while Word, Excel, or PowerPoint are open. They depend on the currently active Entourage identity for some of this information.)

To some extent Mac OS X makes the identities feature obsolete. After all, it’s typical now for everyone who shares a Mac OS X machine to sign in with a name and password—and therefore each person’s mail, calendar, and other information is already separate. Still, there’s nothing to stop you from using Identities on Macs configured with but one user account (because it’s just you and a spouse, ...