Microsoft Entourage has its own Script menu, which was available even before the Mac OS had one. It is still used by longtime Entourage users, although the system's Script menu works for Entourage, too. The Entourage Script menu has two advantages over the system's:
Scripts run from it run marginally faster, but that's much less noticeable since Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger), in which the system Script menu benefits from faster calls to applications.
There is an excellent method for adding keyboard shortcuts to scripts. For more information about keyboard shortcuts, see "About the Script menu" in Entourage 2004 Help.
You can run scripts several times a day using a keyboard shortcut, which is a great boon.
However, the Entourage Script menu may have issues with scripts that have properties whose values persist between script runs.
The scripts made using Macintosh Script Editor are now data fork-only files. The Entourage 2004 Script menu can run these, but it does not retain changes in script property values when the script ends. The old resource fork scripts were replaced in Script Editor 2, which was released with Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther). But Microsoft Office 2004 still has to work in Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar), which was still prevalent when Office 2004 came out and could not adopt the new Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) APIs for script menus.
So if you write a script that uses script properties whose values can be altered by script, you have the following three choices:
Run it from the system Script menu, just as you do for your Microsoft Word and Excel scripts, and manage without keyboard shortcuts.
In some script editors, you can still save the scripts in resource fork format.
Find a script that will convert your data fork script into a resource fork script using a UNIX shell script. You drop your script on it, and it's converted.
If you save your script as an application to be run externally, none of these issues apply.
To run scripts from the Entourage Script menu, which is on the left side of the menu bar next to the Help menu, put your scripts in the /Users/username/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items folder. They then appear as menu items on the Entourage Script menu.
