What is Secretary?

Secretary is an application which works with Microsoft Entourage 2001. It allows you to type your Tasks, Events or Notes in plain English, and it will create appropriate items in Entourage!

For example, if you typed: "Big meeting with John, Adam and Lynn at Moscone Convention Center", Secretary would recognise that you wanted to make an Event, it would set the location of the event to "Moscone Convention Center", it would search your Address Book for contacts called John, Adam and Lynn (asking you choose which contact you mean, where more than one matching contact is found), and link those contacts to the new event. It will also set the Category of the event by inheriting categories from the contacts.

But that's not all. Secretary allows you to fully customise the way in which it recognises what you've typed; you really can tweak the recognition to suit your own bizarre styles. It also shows you its interpretation of what you've typed before actually making the new item, and it can similarly show you the AppleScript it has written to create the item (also allowing you to launch your favourite AppleScript editor if you want to tweak the script yourself).

Lastly, Secretary is triggered via an AppleScript in the Scripts menu in Entourage. So, you can invoke Secretary from within Entourage simply by choosing a menu-command, or using a keyboard shortcut (the default shortcut for Secretary is command-option-control-T).

So it's just like a real Secretary?

You might say that, yes. However, unlike a real secretary, there are a few things it can't do:

What do I need to use it?

You need a PowerPC Mac, a copy of Microsoft Entourage 2001 (part of Office 2001, and also available separately), and you need to have AppleScript installed. Secretary uses AppleScript to work its magic.

It's recommended that you run this beta version of Secretary in Mac OS 8/9, though it will run in the Classic environment on OS X.

How much does it cost?

This is a BETA version of Secretary, so you can download and use it for free. However, it will expire on 1st April 2002, and since it's a beta there are incomplete features (and quite probably a few bugs too). You use it entirely at your own risk (try to imagine some suitably threatening background music playing at this point).

Note: because this is a beta version, you are honour-bound to send us feedback. You must!

Click the links below to see some screenshots of the Mac OS 9.x version of Secretary in action. Please note that the user interface of Secretary is likely to change before the release version is available.

If you're having problems downloading, read the Information section on the main Products page.

IMPORTANT: This is BETA software. Just in case you missed that: THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Scotland Software provides no warranty or guarantee of any kind for this software. Whilst every effort has been made to assure that the software always functions as expected, this is not guaranteed. In no event will Scotland Software be held responsible for any damage or loss of data or otherwise which may occur due to use of the software. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Download Secretary 1.0b1 for Mac OS 8/9/Classic:

 Download Secretary 1.0b1 (718k) from Chicago via HTTP

And finally: remember to send us your feedback! You'll feel considerably better about yourself if you do.