Some bits of information may have been associated with your project when you created it with the New Project Wizard. For example, you may have imported items that had a certain category or items from another project. Other things, such as email messages, can be associated automatically, as discussed in Step7 of the previous section.
Most of the time, however, you associate items with projects manually. Entourage gives you several ways to accomplish the task:
If you have the Project Center window open and want to add items to the project, you can click the Add button at the bottom of the window to do so; see “Adding Items in the Project Center,” next for important tips.
Working in Entourage, if you can see the item that you want to add, you can add it quickly by clicking a button or choosing a menu item; Associating Items From the Toolbar and Using Menus to Associate Items explains how.
If you want incoming or outgoing email meeting certain criteria to automatically become part of a project, you can set up a Mail Rule, as I describe in Adding Items with a Mail Rule.
If you’re already working in the Project Center window, use the Add button at the bottom of the window to add items to the project. The odd thing about this button is that it acts differently depending on which tab of the Project Center you’re in. In the Overview and Schedule tabs, the button triggers a pop-up menu that allows you to add any kind of item (Event, Task, Message, File, Contact, Clipping, or Note). In the other five tabs (Mail, Files, Contacts, Clippings, and Notes), clicking the Add button allows you to add only the kind of data shown in that tab.
Tip
The New button at the bottom of the Project Center window displays the same behavior; it’s a pop-up menu in the Overview and Schedule tabs, and a regular button in the rest.
In the Overview and Schedule tabs, click the Add button, then choose the kind of item you want to add. In other tabs, just click the Add button. Entourage displays a dialog that lets you add the kind of item that you chose, as seen in Figure 7. Only items that have not already been added to the project appear in this dialog. Select the item that you want (you can use the Shift or Command keys to extend the selection), then click Add.
The toolbar in Entourage windows now contains a Projects pop-up menu with a briefcase icon and a label (if the window isn’t wide enough to display the label, the briefcase appears alone). To associate an item with a project, select the item and choose the project from the Projects pop-up menu in the toolbar.
You have two ways to use menus to connect an item with a project. After selecting the item, you can choose Edit > Projects > project name. Or you can Control-click (right-click if you have a multiple-button mouse) and choose Projects > project name from the contextual menu.
You can automatically associate email with a project by using a Mail Rule, which can be run with incoming or outgoing mail. This approach is considerably more flexible than the automatic association of emails you can set up with the New Project Wizard, as you can define multiple criteria in a Mail Rule that must be met for the email to associate with the project. For example, you can test a message for a particular sender, then for a file attachment, then for a particular subject or words in the message body, such as a message from a colleague that references the project name.
To create a Mail Rule to associate mail with a project, follow these steps:
Choose Tools > Rules. The Rules dialog appears.
Click the tab for the type of mail rule you’ll be creating. For example, if you use POP email, click Mail (POP).
Click New. The Edit Rule dialog appears.
If you prefer, you can click Edit to add the project criteria to an existing rule.
Give the rule a name, then set the If criteria.
In the Then section of the Edit Rule dialog, choose Set Project, then choose the project from the pop-up menu that will appear.
Click OK to save the rule.
After you associate items with a project, you can use the seven tabs of the Project Center to track and edit those items as the project progresses.