After you’ve set up a reminder for an appointment or task in Entourage (or via a Flag as a To Do Item in any Office 2008 program), Office displays handy onscreen alerts when your reminders come due. You can instruct these alerts to go away or to return later, or you can use them for quick access to appropriate appointments, tasks, or messages.
Office 2008 uses a small add-on program called Microsoft Office Reminders to handle these tipoffs. (It’s in the Microsoft Office 2008 → Office folder, if you’re curious.) When an event or To Do item or comes due, Office Reminders appears as a separate item in the Mac OS X Dock. When you’ve dealt with any pending items, Office Reminders vanishes, reappearing when it’s time for the next reminder or follow-up.
It might sound complicated to deal with yet another program to handle alerts and notifications, but Office Reminders is straightforward. First, you can manage everything about alerts and notifications within Entourage, so you don’t really feel like you’re using a separate program. Second, using a separate tiny program to handle alerts and notifications means these alerts work all the time, even when no Office 2008 programs are running. (Of course, you can turn off Office Reminders at any time, so you won’t be interrupted as you demo your Photoshop techniques to a room full of artists who probably don’t really care that The Beverly Hillbillies is going to start in five minutes on Channel 64. Choose Office Reminders → Turn Off Reminders, or within Entourage choose Entourage → Turn Off Office Reminders—and then slap a Post-it on your screen to remind you to turn Office Reminders back on later.)
When a reminder comes due, the Office Reminders window appears in front of any other programs, a sound plays, and the name of the item appears. If more than one item is due, the Office Reminders window lists them all, but you’ll have to either scroll or drag the window larger to see them all. Figure 11-20 shows five different kinds of notifications: a Microsoft Word document flagged for follow-up, a contact that’s been flagged as a To Do List item, a task set up in Entourage, an email message reminder, and a calendar reminder. The Office Reminders window also displays to important buttons: Snooze, and Dismiss. Snooze and Dismiss also act as pop-up menus; see the next section for details on these options.
Figure 11-20. Here Office Reminders shows five items: a Microsoft Word document that’s flagged for follow up, a contact that’s been added to the To Do List (and is overdue), a task, an email message reminder, and a calendar reminder. The highlighted item appears at the top of the window. Double-click any of them to open the linked item.
Reminders show three basic items:
Icon. A reminder’s icon indicates where the alert came from. For example, a reminder about an appointment displays a calendar icon, and a flagged Microsoft Word document appears with a Word document icon (Figure 11-20).
Subject. The reminder’s title is the subject of the appointment or task you set up, or it indicates the title of the document or message you flagged.
Due date. Office Reminders also shows the item’s due date or, for reminders of pending calendar items, how much time remains until the event. If an item is past due (like the second item in Figure 11-20), Office Reminders shows Overdue followed by the due date.
You can double-click any item in the reminder list to open the associated item immediately. Opening a flagged document or message doesn’t dismiss or snooze the alert in Office Reminders (see next section); it just brings the flagged item front and center for you to act on, so you don’t first have to hunt around your computer for it.
Tasks and flagged documents also have a checkbox you can use to mark an item as complete. This checkbox actually performs two functions in one easy step: It indicates that you’re finished with an item and dismisses the alert box.
When a reminder appears, you can process it in one of three ways: by opening it, snoozing it, or dismissing it.
Open Item. Double-clicking an item opens the corresponding document, task, calendar entry, or mail message in Entourage. (If an item is already highlighted, you can also summon it with a single click of the large icon at the top of the reminder window.)
Snooze. Use the Snooze button to make an alert go away—for now. The selected item reappears in five minutes to nag you again. If you want items to snooze for a different amount of time (say, until tomorrow morning), use the Snooze pop-up menu (see Figure 11-21).
Dismiss. Click Dismiss to make a selected alert go away, never to be seen again.
If you want to dismiss all the items shown by Office Reminders, choose Dismiss All from the Dismiss pop-up button. All the current reminders are dismissed (although no documents or tasks get marked as completed).
Tip
You can select multiple items in the Office Reminders window just by Shift-clicking to select a range of items, or ⌘-clicking to choose nonadjacent items in the list—exactly as in the Finder or in the Entourage email list. At that point, the Snooze and Dismiss buttons affect all the corresponding items letting you snooze or dismiss a bunch of related items all at once.
Mark as Complete. Use the Complete checkbox on tasks and flagged items to indicate you’re finished with the task or item you flagged. Unlike other elements appearing with individual alert items, turning on the Complete checkbox both marks the task as completed and dismisses the alert, so that the item disappears from Office Reminders.
Note
Watch out—the program doesn’t allow enough time to un check the box if you make a mistake. If you turn on the Complete checkbox on an item that you really aren’t done with, you have to return to Entourage’s Task list, where the item appears with a line through its name. To “uncomplete” an item, turn off the Complete checkbox in the Status column (and set up another reminder, if you like).
Office Reminders is a simple program, generally keeping out of sight until the moment when you want to be prompted about something. You can change only two settings: whether the program is turned on or turned off and whether or not an alert sound plays when an item comes due.
Sometimes you might not want Office Reminders to display alerts onscreen, even if something comes due. For instance, you can be using your Mac to give a demo or presentation to clients—or concentrating on the New York Times Sunday crossword. (We all have our priorities.)
Here are the two ways to turn off Office Reminders:
In Entourage, choose Entourage → Turn Off Office Reminders.
If Office Reminders is already on your screen, click its window once to ensure it’s the frontmost program, and then choose Microsoft Office Reminders → Turn Off Reminders.
Turning Office Reminders back on again is almost identical:
Office Reminders generally plays a sound when an alert appears. If you don’t want to hear these sounds, turn them off by choosing Microsoft Office Reminders → Turn Off Sounds. Alternatively, choose Entourage → Preferences → General Preferences → Notification and turn off the checkbox next to “Reminder sound.” To turn the sound back on, just turn the “Reminder sound” checkbox back on.