Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

428 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

3. If, instead, you want to link to an empty, brand-new Mail Message, News Mes-

sage, Calendar Event, Task, Note, Contact, or Group, choose from the Tools→Link

to New submenu.

(Here again, you can also use the Link pop-up button on the Entourage toolbar

to produce the Link to New submenu.)

Entourage creates the corresponding tidbit (email message, calendar event, or

whatever) right away and lets you fill in the details on the fly. When you save the

new item, Entourage automatically forges the link. For example, if you link

somebody’s address book card to a new mail message, Entourage creates a new

mail message for you to address and fill out.

Using Links

Once you’ve created links to a particular Entourage item, a tiny chain-link icon ap-

pears next to its name. At this point, you can view a pop-up list of its links. By

choosing one of them, you instantly open the Link item.

To view this pop-up list of links, use one of these techniques:

• Click the chain-link icon that appears next to its name and use it as a menu.

• Highlight an item that displays the chain-link icon, and then use the Link pop-

up button on the Entourage toolbar as a menu, as in Figure 11-4.

• Highlight an icon that shows the chain-link icon and then choose Tools→Open

Links.

This last technique opens the Links window, which lets you go beyond simply open-

ing link items. Its toolbar buttons—Open, Remove Link, Link to Existing Item, or

Link to New Item—let you open the item to which the link leads, remove a link, or

create a link to new or existing item, respectively.

Tip: By the way, if all of this linking business sounds like it creates more busywork than it eliminates, you

can ignore Links completely. You wouldn’t be alone.

Categories

Categories are labels that you can apply to just about any Entourage item. They’re

designed to let you apply an organizational scheme to a group of items that may not

have much in common.

For example, you can define a category related to a trip that you’re taking, or to a

certain work project, and apply that category to dissimilar Entourage information

bits (calendar, email, and to-do items, for example). Each category can have its own

color, making it easy to identify at a glance. Categories, in other words, are a conve-

nient, easy-to-use means of helping you organize and keep track of your Entourage

information.

Links

chapter 11: advanced entourage 429

Setting Up Categories

Entourage comes with eight prefab categories—Family, Friends, Holiday, Junk, Per-

sonal, Recreation, Travel, and Work. If you import holidays into Entourage—see

page 389—they show up in a category of their own.

You can also create new categories, of course. To do so, choose Edit Categories from

the Categories pop-up button on the toolbar, or choose Edit→Categories→Edit

Categories. Either way, you now face the Edit Categories window (Figure 11-6). To

create a new category, click New and type the name you want. Entourage assigns a

color to your new category, but you can choose any of the thirteen colors listed on

the pop-up menu, or choose Other to mix your own color.

You can also delete a category: Click its name and then click Delete.

Tip: The Categories window has one other nifty feature: the Find Items in Category button. Select a

category for which you’d like to search for items, and then click this button. Entourage shows you a tidy

listing all of the items in your Entourage world—messages, tasks, and so on—that have been assigned to

that category.

Assigning a Category

To apply a category to an Entourage item—an email message, calendar event, task,

note, news message, contact, or even an item in the email Folder list—highlight it.

(You can highlight a lot of them at once, if that’s what you want to do.) Use the

Figure 11-6:

Top: Entourage lets you create any

number of your own categories, which

you can then apply to Entourage items of

any kind—including folders in your email

box.

Bottom: To assign multiple categories to

an item, open the Assign Categories

window and then turn on the checkboxes

next to the categories you want to assign.

Once you’ve done so, click OK; Entourage

assigns all checked categories to the

selected items.

Categories