Outlook for Mac 2016 to OmniFocus

Microsoft Outlook or its predecessor Entourage have never been the most popular email clients on the Mac, but the folks from Redmond have significantly improved it over the years and some people quite simply have not much of a choice. In particular if you work in a large corporation which historically uses (a locked down version of) Exchange.

While Outlook 2016 for Mac is a huge leap forward, providing nearly feature parity with its Windows twin, Microsoft made some changes to the AppleScript interface and how scripts get executed. Most notably the Script Menu has disappeared which removes the easy and convenient approach of dropping your AppleScript into a defined folder and subsequently trigger it from a menu or even with a keyboard shortcut.

At the beginning people also observed some changes on the Outlook AppleScript interface as well which put some of the existing scripts at risk. However, Justin Lancy’s AppleScript to clip Outlook items into OmniFocus’ inbox seems to still work perfectly fine. At least for emails which are the only Outlook objects I tested (and need).

Of course you are asking “Why are you not just using the Mac OS X OmniFocus Clipping Service?” Well, Outlook has come a long way, but it is not fully embracing some of Mac OS X’s native features yet.

As the script still works the only missing part of the workflow is an easy way to trigger it. If you happen to have FastScripts you are sorted already. Otherwise let’s ask a good friend: Alfred.

Building a workflow to trigger a script is relatively easy. In this case you need to make sure you use the “Run Script”-Action as the script won’t run as part of the “Run NSAppleScript”-Action. Add a keyword and a keyboard shortcut to trigger it and you are done. I have chosen the same keyboard shortcut I use for OmniFocus’ official Mac OS X clipping service and limited its scope to Outlook and therefore overwrite the system default, saving me an additional shortcut to remember.

Feel free to download the Alfred workflow. Use, change and debug it at your own risk and pleasure.

All credits have to go to Justin Lancy of Veritrope.com for developing the actual script. I just connected some boxes in the Alfred workflow designer.

Find all of my OmniFocus posts in my ‘Essentials’ collection. If you like to master OmniFocus, I really recommend the excellent ‘Learn OmniFocus’ learning platform as well as the pragmatic ‘Working with OmniFocus’ video tutorials.