Automate. Perform repetitive tasks automatically in a few seconds, instead of spending minutes or even hours plowing through them yourself. For example, you can run a script in Entourage to set the default address to the Home address, rather than Entourage’s default of the Work address. If you have 1,000 contacts, this script will take about a minute to run, as opposed to multiple hours opening and changing each contact manually. Now you can print address labels for your Wear-Your-Bathrobe-to-Work Day cards without skipping the folks whose work addresses you don’t know.

Customize. Devise your own routines, sometimes even doing things that are impossible to do yourself onscreen in the first place. The world is your oyster: You can write scripts to duplicate calendar events (Entourage can’t do that on its own), add a BCC to your boss on all email messages you send out, add a contact to a particular group without messing about finding or opening the group, remove all single carriage returns pasted into a Word document in one fell swoop without affecting double-returns at ends of paragraphs, and much, much more.

Interact. Control several different programs in one workflow. You can take a letterhead document you’ve created in Word and have it open as a new letter addressed to a selected Entourage contact, complete with date, address, salutation, and signature already in place. Or you can export full contact information (street, city, state, phone numbers, email addresses, and so on) for every member of a group or category to an Excel worksheet or FileMaker Pro database—or both.