I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 this weekend to set up on our home machine, and the upgrade has gone quite smoothly. There will be plenty of commentary about the new features in Office 2004, but I thought I’d mention one thing about Entourage’s mail rules before you upgrade. Entourage 2004 imported my old mail, contacts and calendar events without a hitch, but it didn’t import my old mail rules. I had kept a backup system with the old Entourage on it (for just this reason – I’m not that foolhardy). I simply switched to that machine, opened each rule, did a screen capture (with Command-Shift-4), and dumped the image files for my 17 vital rules into a folder on my main Mac. Then, I recreated each rule, which took a while, but it was a lot easier than trying to remember what each rule was supposed to be: I simply opened the folder of images in Preview, and, as I rebuilt each rule, I had the original on-screen for reference. I just thought I would mention this so that people upgrading might want to think about before nuking (after backing up, of course) the old version. Other than that, I haven’t run into anything that caused me any grief, which is nice. [Update:Since the original post, a few readers have noted that their rules imported without problem. I tried it a second time, on a different system, and they still didn’t import correctly (they weren’t Exchange Server rules, so they should have come across fine). I don’t know if it’s just my Mac, but I’ve got my rules in fine now, so it’s not a big deal.]
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