Product Reviews

At first sight, a personal information manager (PIM) appears to be nothing more than a computerised version of a Filofax. PIMs offer a diary for keeping track of appointments, an alphabetical section for storing names and addresses, and space for jotting down notes and reminders. But the comparison with a standard personal organiser is actually rather a limited one. PIMs are tied to a lump of hardware that's far less convenient than a diary and less intuitive than a pencil, and a PIM won't tolerate sloppy habits like scrawled notes on dog-eared scraps of paper.

But for anyone who's well organised and prepared to put in the effort, a good PIM can rapidly become indispensable. The main benefits are automation and integration - automatic reminders of appointments and special dates, easy handling of regular events, and the creation of tight links between the who and the when of your appointments.

The eight packages tested here cover a wide area. Some have extra facilities such as built-in word processing which can handle all business correspondence from a list of contact details with a single click. Others include facilities for sharing a diary across a network. The latest trend is to provide direct links to email and Web browsers. And there are still plenty of PIMs which trim all the frills and go for a basic approach, content to be accessories to other applications.

Day in day out

The diary is a central component of any PIM. It should allow you to enter, view and change appointments as intuitively as possible. A good diary will also be able to cope with recurring events, conflicting appointments and alarms. All eight programs provide day, week and month view, and many also have miniature calendars.

The most flexible diary is found in Claris Organizer, which has plus and minus buttons to let you add or remove days or weeks from screen view. This is ideal if you want to see only the next three days, or need to quickly check your schedule for next week. Organizer also handles links intelligently; if you enter 'lunch with Jim', it automatically produces a list of all the Jims in its Contacts database.

The calendar in Expresso 1.0 has the most distinctive styling and offers a choice of 22 different looks - although many are so dominated by graphics that they are virtually unreadable. The excellent Flashback feature will place the calendar on your desktop background with a single click. One of the program's serious weaknesses, however, is that the day view has no timeline, so entries are listed next to bullet points with no graphical representation of the day's schedule. This is not a problem in Day-to-Day 1.0 (bundled with Dynodex 3.5) or Now Up-to-Date (bundled with Contact 3.6), both of which have clearly designed calendar views. These two packages also provide menu bar icons to allow quick access to the diary even when the application itself isn't running.

ACT 2.5 is unusual in that it only allows diary entries which are linked to a contact in its address book. This works if you need to schedule a meeting but is very frustrating when you simply want to remind yourself to buy some cornflakes. ACT's inability to create banner entries and its limited facilities for handling recurring events are further shortcomings in what is otherwise a competent business program.

WebArranger 2.0 is the most unorthodox PIM, but its calendar module is conventional and easy to operate, allowing you to customise specific entries - a pop-up list of meeting rooms for appointments, for example. The big disappointment is the HyperCard-based MacBoy 1.01. It provides day and month views but no links between them, so entries made in one don't appear in the other. Neither is there a facility for setting start or finish dates for recurring appointments, or for adjusting alarms.

Another standard component of any PIM is its contacts database. The essential requirements of which are a wealth of fields - including customisable fields - and good facilities for searching and filtering records. Localisation is also important, as UK addresses are structured differently from US addresses.

ACT offers over 70 fields, many of which can be given custom names. It's also one of the few to provide enough space to accommodate UK addresses, although there's no preset Country field for foreign addresses. If you enter only part of a company name matching an existing record, ACT will automatically fill in the rest of the record, including the company's address. Unfortunately, ACT's list view is not comprehensive, as it shows only the Company, Contact, County and Phone fields in a window which can't be altered or re-sized.

Now Contact is a strong performer with a sensible balance of preset and user-defined fields, although there is not enough space to display long address entries in full. The latest version recognises Internet addresses and URLs, and automatically creates an icon which lets you send email or link directly to a Web page. Internet links are another strong feature of WebArranger, which, more importantly, provides unrivalled flexibility, allowing you to define up to 100 fields and create pop-up menus, links to other files, check boxes and other elements. Entries are displayed in a vertical list which can be collapsed or expanded, and forms for data entry can also be created.

Customisation Organizer has a reasonable range of customisable fields and provides pop-ups to simplify data entry for certain fields. Several of the address fields are too small, however, which means entries often get truncated when displayed. Dynodex offers no customisable fields at all, it being a fast and no-nonsense program which gives all the core data without any extras. Expresso aims for the same simplicity of approach, but its sparse selection of small fields crammed into a tiny form of fixed size is inadequate. MacBoy has no fields at all, nor a list view. You simply enter free-form data into a floating window (rather like Stickies), and when you close the windo, it collapses into a rectangle on the name card. There's no way to group entries or to return a list of results after running a find routine.

To-do lists None of the programs let you create your own form layouts with the exception of WebArranger, which does let you allocate space where needed, although it can be an awkward process. The only program with a generous range of preset layouts is ACT (which has 20); Now Contact provides four, while most of the others have just one.

To-do lists are designed to handle those tasks which aren't tied to a specific time, such as calls to make, letters to write, shopping lists and so on. All applications tested here incorporate to-do lists, and all except one (MacBoy) let you prioritise tasks. Apart from Expresso and MacBoy, all can display to-do items in calendar view so it's possible to see both scheduled and unscheduled tasks for any day. You can also keep unfinished tasks displayed until you mark them as completed.

With Expresso and MacBoy you get a separate to-do list, which means tasks can't be linked to a specific day and simply remain on the list until deleted. Neither program will let you group tasks into projects, and nor does ACT, although that's because ACT's to-do lists, like its scheduled calendar entries, have to be tied to a specific contact for classification.

ADVERTISEMENT

All other PIMs tested here allow you to define categories and attach them to any task.

Import/export

If you've already got contacts stored on a computer, either in a general purpose database or another PIM, it would be frustrating to have to re-enter them. Fortunately, many of these programs read files from other applications directly, and if that's not possible then a tab-delimited text file will usually do the trick. Once again, the only program inadequate in this regard is MacBoy, which is not compatible with any other application. The other PIMs tested here can import a variety of formats. All except Dynodex let you view data from an imported file against field names, and by doing this you can be certain the right fields have been selected in the right order. With Dynodex, you have to make a note of the field order.

It is possible to produce mail merge files for export to a word processor with all these packages except MacBoy and Organizer. Both ACT and Now Contact have built-in word processing modules, which means you can avoid external merging altogether.

Printing PIMs are powerful but can't be slipped into a coat pocket or handbag, and you'll probably need to print address book and diary pages for a Filofax or other personal organiser. Of the applications tested here, the only ones which can print Filofax-size pages (95mm by 170mm) with adequate space for holes and no truncated lines are Organizer, Dynodex and Now Contact.

Organizer splits contacts across page breaks and wastes paper by fitting only two Filofax pages onto an A4 sheet. It takes some experimentation to get the paper size right on Dynodex. Both ACT and Expresso produce pages which are much too narrow, and Expresso will ignore any page range you enter into the Print dialog box. Results from WebArranger and MacBoy were also entirely unsuitable, and even Now Contact and Dynodex could benefit from improved layout control. The Now bundle comes closest to getting it right.

Word processors

The word processor modules found in ACT and Now Contact are no rival to dedicated word processing applications but they're capable of producing memos, letters and faxes. The big advantage is that you can go straight from the contact to the letter, fax or envelope without copying and pasting. ACT and Now Contact both automatically link the letter or fax to the contact record, allowing you to track your correspondence. Dynodex doesn't have word processing but does include a simple outliner.

On the road If you plan to take your PIM with you when you travel, the facility to synchronise files between a PowerBook and a desktop Mac is invaluable. Only ACT and Expresso can do this properly. Dynodex and Now Contact will synchronise contact files but their partners - Day-to-Day and Now Up-to-Date - can't synchronise calendars.

Another powerful feature, found only in ACT, is a macro recorder which lets you store sequences and play them back later using a menu command or an icon in the toolbar. This also allows you to attach AppleScripts to icons.

File sharing

PIMs are essentially single-user applications, but there may be occasions when you will want to share the information stored in it. The simplest network solution comes from Expresso, which lets you share calendars, although not contacts or to-do lists. Its no-frills approach has minimal security but does the job and is easy to configure. If you create additional multi-user calendars, these can be used for scheduling resources such as meeting rooms or items of equipment.

For more serious multi-user facilities you'll need ACT or the Now bundle, which let you set up public databases on a network server and provide proper access control for administrators and users. The Now bundle even includes specific workgroup features such as automatic diary resolution so that you can select meeting times when everyone is available.

The last word Applications which eat up a lot of RAM and hard disk space are common, but slimness is still a virtue when it comes to PIMs. This is partly because they're often used on PowerBooks and partly because you'll probably want to leave a PIM running continuously while you are using other programs.

If memory is tight, the best applications are Organizer, Expresso or the Day-to-Day/Dynodex bundle. The heavyweights among the eight are the Now bundle and WebArranger, which really need at least 12Mb of RAM to perform properly, or even more if you intend to use them alongside other applications.

With such a varied collection of applications, picking the best and worst is not a simple task because so much depends on individual needs. For the home user, Expresso is fun to use and reasonably compact, but you'll have to put up with address fields localised for the US and a cramped layout. Organizer and the Day-to-Day/Dynodex bundle bridge the home and business markets. Organizer is a clever program with excellent integration but it lacks features which are available elsewhere. However, a new version is about to ship. Day-to-Day/ Dynodex contains a lot of good features which haven't been hung together very well.

ACT is a bulky application that has been built around its contacts database. If this is suitable for your requirements, and you can cope with its occasional limitations, you'll find it doesn't lack power. But for general business use the Now bundle would be quite difficult to beat. It's less stylish than many but at least the essentials, such as printing and field localisation, are done properly. The recent addition of simple Internet links is welcome.

WebArranger is the program which grabs the attention most. It doesn't look like a PIM, and it doesn't work like one either, but it is the most powerful and flexible program tested here, even if you ignore its Internet features. It's worth taking time to master its functions and customise it to your methods of working.

PIMs online

The facility to share data across a network was the feature that distinguished the best of the last generation of PIMs. Today, Internet credentials are similarly important, and two of the programs tested here provide specific Internet facilities.

WebArranger's commitment to the Web all but swamps the PIM lurking beneath. As you might expect, it allows you to send email and skip directly to a Web site from any address or URL in its database. More unique are the range of plug-ins and utilities that come with WebArranger which are designed to help you manage your Internet activity. The most impressive of these are agents which work in the background, automatically checking URLs to see if they're valid or reporting on specified Web pages if they have changed since your last visit. There's also an agent which will repeatedly try busy FTP sites in order to download files.

WebArranger provides a further utility called WebWhacker which lets you download pages or entire Web sites, complete with active links, so they can be browsed offline. Another useful tool is the Grabber, which lets you define a key combination which will copy selected text or graphics and store it in a clipboard. Next time you open WebArranger, grabbed items will appear as notes under the topic Clippings. This facility is ideal for picking up URLs from Web pages.

The Now bundle is the other PIM of this bunch which has recently added Internet facilities. If you enter email addresses or URLs - either by typing them in or by dragging them directly from a Web page - into any of Now Contact's custom fields, they'll automatically acquire an icon which will take you to the page or create an email message. The only limitation of Now Contact is that you have to use Netscape Navigator for all online tasks, including email. WebArranger takes a more sensible approach, using the freeware Internet Config utility to link to any browser or mail program.