Microsoft office and Entourage for a MAC

[rodeman]

Hello everyone,

I'm using Microsoft office and Entourage on my Mac and get frustrated every time I try and switch identities. It won't change from my wife's identity to mine (or back the other way) unless you quit all office programs (word, excel, power point).

I'm not sure why you have to do this each time, but that seems to be the rule. Is there a check box that will break this requirement or a work around? I'd really like to be able to let her check her email while I'm working without going through this every time.

Thanks,
John

 

[nadyne]

Sorry, but that's the way it is -- there are some shared features of Office that rely on the shared database, so you have to quit the other apps to switch identities.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're using one user account on your Mac, and using multiple Entourage identities. You could instead set up multiple user accounts and only use each Entourage identity in its user account. That would avoid this issue, and would be just as fast -- in Tiger and Leopard, you can quickly switch between your user accounts without having to login/logout of each one.

For more information about setting up multiple user accounts, you can read Apple's help for creating a new user account (which they recommend you do when you have multiple people using the same computer). Then check out their help about quickly switching between accounts to learn more about that.

After you've got your user account set up, you'll just need to move one of the identities to the same location in the new user account.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[rodeman]

Thanks for the info. Both accounts are in entourage. I'm not using a mac account at all. It is just a pain to have to quit word everytime we want to switch email accounts.

it's not like that on my PC with Outlook, so it looks like the PC wins in that category, but thats about the only one.

John

 

[nadyne]

When you first set up your Mac, you created a user account. You might never think about it, especially since OS X is set up to automatically login and not require a password when you boot up your computer, but it's part of the set-up process and you can't get around it.

Apple recommends that, if you have multiple people using the same computer, you set up different user accounts for each of them. We recommend it too, and our implementation of the shared Office database is optimised for the case where you're following Apple's recommendation. If you follow the links that I gave earlier, you'll see that setting up multiple accounts really isn't difficult at all -- it probably won't take you more than five minutes to do everything. The most difficult thing about it will be that you and your wife will need to remember the passwords for the two different accounts. If you're really uncomfortable with doing it, you can make an appointment with the Genius Bar at your friendly local Apple Store and ask them to help you out. But Apple's directions are really easy to follow for setting this up, so I think it's worth giving it a try.

Regards,
Nadyne.