Last night, I lamented about the serious issues that Entourage 2008 has in terms of sharing task list data with or exporting data to other applications. Tonight, on a whim I decided to give one more method a try: exporting the task list to PDF.
Outputting a task (to-do) list from Entourage 2008 to PDF will effectively “get the text out”. In other words, whatever you see on your current task view will be outputted as text data to PDF. Once you’ve outputted to PDF, the possibilities are… well… ahem…
Limited. No, extremely limited.
Okay, lest you think I’m just being hard on the poor application, I’ll give you some hard facts.
The reason why the text outputted from Entourage 2008 task lists as PDF is nearly unusable is because Entourage 2008 decides that no tabs or delimiting characters are required to separate the different columns in Entourage (for instance, “title”, “categories”, “due date”, “projects” and so on). What this means to you is that if there are any other columns (fields) outputted in your PDF from Entourage, the columns will all be mercilessly mashed together into one line. No tabs, no spaces, no way to separate the columns. Just one big heap of information.
Try it for yourself, and see if this looks like something you can use. The more tasks, the merrier. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
There is, of course, the option of printing to PDF from “My Day”, the floating dark purple applet that is available in Entourage 2008. However, you will get only task names—no other fields will be printed, period. If you have several dozen tasks and you don’t relish the thought of typing them in again, this might be a workable solution. At least you will be able to copy and paste the text from the resulting “My Day”-outputted PDF into a new file.
On the other hand, iCal allows for tasks (to-dos) within the To do list to be copied and pasted as plain text into other applications such as Excel. This works well enough if you haven’t assigned any due dates or written any notes into the notes area of your to-dos. If you have, you will need to spend more time sorting through the results once you’ve pasted them into Excel or wherever you’ve decided to paste them, unfortunately.
…And if you thought that open-source was the answer, you won’t find much satisfaction in exporting your tasks from the current build (version 0.8) of Mozilla Sunbird, either, sorry to say.
However you slice it, all three of our task management applications discussed here for the Mac are bad news when it comes to exporting your task list… in ANY fashion.