Certainly I’ am trying to be organised and effective. And certainly one good starting point for this is to be as lazy as possible. And this was exactly what made me think about how to most effectively create my GTD David Allen like A-Z folders in Entourage for my project reference material/archive.

Entourage is pretty unfriendly when you want to create a high number of folders: It’s all mouse click here - mouse click there. Also the newly created subfolder gets selected, so you need to click back on the top-level folder, get the context menu, select “Create Subfolder” and so on.

I use multiple top-level folders, for example:

• Client Business
• Internal Projects
• Company Internal
• Department Internal
• Company General
• General Reference Material
• Personal
• Private

I also use numbers in front of the names to keep my desired order, e.g. 010 or 020. Anyway, since I needed A-Z folders in these top-level folders, I thought about writing a simple AppleScript to do the job for me. And here it is:

set folder_list to {”A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “E”, “F”, “G”, “H”, “I”, “J”, “K”, “L”, “M”, “N”, “O”, “P”, “Q”, “R”, “S”, “T”, “U”, “VW”, “XYZ”}
set folder_name to “Tester”
tell application “Microsoft Entourage”
  set theSelection to selection
    if class of theSelection is folder then
       repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the folder_list
          set folder_name to item i of the folder_list
          make new folder with properties {name:folder_name, parent:theSelection}
       end repeat
    else
       display dialog “You need to select a folder in which you want to create the A-Z subfolders before running this script”
    end if
end tell

Download Entourage Mass Reference Material A-Z Folder Creation.scpt

This is how you use it:

1. Select a folder inside Entourage in which you want to create the subfolder - can be any level inbox/root or lower
2. Run the script from the Script Editor or from the Entourage Script Menu

To add this script to the Entourage Script menu by copying to /Users/[username]/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items. To access it with a hotkey add for example “\cM” at the end of the filename to access it via Control+M

If you wish to separate the VW and XYZ folders edit the folder_list.