Product Reviews

Of all the systems for managing your time, one of the best known - and arguably the most effective - is the one pioneered by Stephen Covey is his book The seven habits of highly effective people. Based around simple principles of prioritising and balancing your life, Covey's work has spawned an entire industry of products and books related to his system.

Not surprisingly, this includes software, of which PlanPlus for Windows XP is the latest example. Unlike FranklinCovey's other software product - PlanPlus for Outlook - this is a standalone application that mirrors the look and feel of one of the company's paper-based planners, with tabs along the edge that are designed to look like the tabs in a binder, contacts pages, and so on.

The product is built from the ground-up to be used with a tablet PC. The entire product is ink-aware, so you can simply write onscreen without having to convert your handwriting to text; and like Microsoft's OneNote, the ink is searchable. However, the product is also perfectly usable with a keyboard, so there's no requirement to use it with a tablet.

Usefully for those who need to keep a foot in the Outlook-equipped world, PlanPlus will synchronise with Outlook itself, keeping your contacts, tasks and appointments in sync. It works well too,

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and we had no problems at all while swapping between the two applications.

As well as planning, PlanPlus is intended as an all-purpose note-taking product, similar in scope to OneNote. You can create tabs with notes, with each note consisting of multiple pages with text or clipped images on them. Notes can be typed or ink, and the product includes a virtual printer driver, which allows you to 'print' any document or web page into a static image on a note.

But there are a couple of minor points that make PlanPlus less than the ideal system. First of all, unlike PlanPlus for Outlook, this version doesn't have wizards to walk you through the typical tasks associated with using the Covey system, such as creating your mission statement or planning long-term goals. There are sections in the binders for all these, but they're basically bare-bone templates, which makes them harder to use for anyone who's just starting with the Covey system. The other problem we found was with the virtual printer driver, which would occasionally crop the edges of web pages in such a way as to cut off a small part of the document. It won't be an everyday problem, but could end up leaving you spending more time on it than it will save - an annoying oversight.

Despite these niggles, PlanPlus is an attractive product for anyone who wants a standalone time-management system, and either doesn't use Outlook at all or uses it mainly for email. If you're a regular Outlook user, we'd recommend you look at PlanPlus for Outlook instead.

However, if you're a tablet PC user, PlanPlus for Windows XP should be one of the essential products on your machine. The combination of note-taking abilities, a planner you can simply write in, and an interface that actually works better in portrait mode than in landscape make it an ideal tablet-based tool, as well as a viable alternative to OneNote.