You won’t find the Project Palette in Entourage; it appears as one of the panes of the new Toolbox in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The benefit of the Project Palette is that you don’t have to leave the other program that you’re working in to view or add project information or files. Entourage doesn’t even need to be running in the background to use the Project Palette, which accesses the Entourage database directly to get constant updates to the Project Center, Calendar, and Tasks List in Entourage.
You can use the Project Palette to:
View any project’s schedule for a given day.
Review and check off Tasks.
Open recent project emails.
Attach the current file that you’re working on to the project.
Open the two Project Watch Folders.
Click a button to open the project in the Project Center in Entourage.
To view the Project Palette (Figure 11, next page) in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, click the red Toolbox button in any of those programs’ Standard toolbars. The Toolbox swoops out of the Standard toolbar with the Genie effect popularized by the Dock. Then, click the Projects button at the top of the Toolbox.
To add the document that you’re currently working on to the project, click the yellow + (plus) button below the name of the project. Clicking the red X button breaks the association of the current document from the project.
If you want to switch to the Entourage Project Watch Folder for this project, click the button with the Entourage icon. Entourage’s Mail view becomes active and displays the contents of the mail folder, just as if you had clicked it in the Folder List.
To open the Finder Project Watch Folder for this project, click the button with the Mac OS icon. The folder opens and you’re switched to the Finder.
In the Schedule section of the palette, the left and right arrow buttons move you through each day, beginning with today. Clicking a calendar item switches you to Entourage and opens the item for editing. The button that looks like a blue star between the left and right arrow buttons creates a new event, again switching you to Entourage.
In the Tasks section, clicking the checkbox next to a task marks the task as done, and removes it from the Project Palette. You can edit a task by double-clicking it.
In the New & Recent Mail section, click a message title to open the message in a new window in Entourage. Clicking the More... link switches you to the Mail tab in the Project Center.
If you click the Go to Project Center button at the bottom of the Project Palette, Entourage becomes active as you would expect, but it isn’t the same as clicking the Project Center button in Entourage’s toolbar, where you see the list of projects at the left side of the window. Instead, the project opens in a new window dedicated to that project.
Tip
People usually work in Entourage in a single window, but that’s unnecessary. Control-clicking (or right-clicking if you have a mouse with multiple buttons) a navigation button brings up a contextual menu that enables you to open that button’s destination in a new window. So if you have the screen real estate, try using multiple windows for Email, the Address Book, and so on. You can switch between windows with the Window menu or with Mac OS X’s Exposé.