Peachpit TV: Creating a Microsoft Entourage 2008 Automator Workflow

Female: Welcome to Mac Automation Made Simple. This series focuses on providing tips and tricks for using AppleScript to an Automator in Mac OS X. Ben Waldie: Hi, welcome back to Mac Automation Made Simple. I'm your host Ben Waldie. For the past several episodes we've been exploring ways to control the Microsoft Office 2008 applications with Automator. So far we've discussed Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this episode, we’ll be taking a look at some of the things that you can do with Entourage. As a reminder, the Office 2008 Automator Actions we’ll be discussing are included with Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition. They're not included with earlier versions of Office or with the Office 2008 for Home and Student Edition. If you’ve ever printed a document to PDF in Mac OS X, you may have noticed the option mail PDF in the print Windows PDF pop up. If you select this option, your document will be printed to PDF and attach to a new outgoing mail message. Well suppose you use Entourage instead of Mail. If you do, then this option won’t be very helpful to you. So let's create our own entourage version of this workflow. Go into Automator and create a new Automator workflow. When the starting points panel appears, choose to create a custom blank workflow. Next, click on the mail category of actions, here’s where you'll find all of the Entourage Automator Actions. Select the Create New Entourage Mail message action and drag it to your workflow. If you look at the description for this action, you'll see that it accepts files and folders as input, that is any files passed to it will be automatically attached to the newly created message. You'll see how this comes into play in a moment. Now let's save this workflow. Select save as plug-in from file menu. We want to trigger this work flow in printing documents to PDF. So enter a name for the workflow such as mail PDF with Entourage. Choose print workflow from the plug-in for pop up and click Save. We’re done. So let's test the workflow. I'm going to go into Microsoft Word and here I've got an open document. I’ll select File-Print to bring up the print window. Now if I click on the PDF pop up at the bottom of the window, I can see my workflow there. I’ll select it and my document gets printed into PDF and the PDF files gets pass to the workflow’s input. Since the Create New Mail Messages Action accepts files and folders as input, the PDF gets attached to the newly created message. Okay, let's create another workflow. How about one that ties entourage to another application, such as Aperture. Like the other Office 2008 applications, in Entourage script menu, you’ll find a number of sample Automator workflows. One of these sample workflows is called Send Image Attaches to iPhoto. Let's create a new one which can save image attachments into Aperture instead of iPhoto. Naturally you'll have to have Aperture installed to follow along. Let me go back into Automator and close my previous workflow. Next I'm going to create a new workflow and again I'm going to choose to create a custom work flow. Now the first thing we want to do is get the image attachments from a message. Click on the mail category and type attach into the search field. Select the saved files attach to entourage in mail messages action and drag it to your workflow. Now if no input is passed to this action, then it will operate on the front opened Entourage message. Let's set this action to save files to the desktop. Next scroll down and select the photos category in Automator’s action library. Type Import into the search field. The action we want is called Import Photos, select it and drag it to the end of the workflow. Next let's set this action to add images to a project called Photos to be sorted. And let's set the action to delete the source images after importing them. Now let's save the workflow. Choose save as from the file menu, next navigate to your documents folder Microsoft to user data, Entourage script menu items, sample Automator workflows. Name the workflow, send image attachments to Aperture and click Save. Now let's give the workflow a try. I'm going to go into entourage and I've got an email in my inbox with some image attachments. So I'm going to open it and then next I'm going to go to the script menu and I'm going to choose my workflow under Sample Automator Workflows, send image attachments to Aperture. The workflow runs and the images are saved to the desktop, imported into Aperture and then removed from the desktop. Thanks for joining me for this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple. Until next time, Automate your Mac and simplify your life. Female: For more on Automator check out Ben Waldie’s Automator Visual Click Start Guide available from Peachpit Press.