Today marks a big event for this longtime writer of software reviews. It’s a tradition that harkens back to 1993, when this column first raved about Info Select, the do-just-about-anything personal information manager.
A new version, Info Select 7 for Windows 95 and above, has arrived. It costs $149 for new users and $99 for upgrades, and it’s worth every penny, particularly if you are a new user. Its developers say this is the most sweeping upgrade ever. Believe me, that’s saying a lot.
It is harder to adequately describe Info Select than it is to use it. But use it you must, in my humble opinion.
At the heart of things, Info Select is an unstructured personal database that stores all kinds of information as a virtually unlimited collection of individual notes. A note can be just a name and a phone number or a 30,000-word report. It can be a snatch of poetry, the lyrics to a song or a grocery list.
One adds each note by opening a blank window. As note follows note, a topic line for each gets displayed in a narrow panel to the left of the screen. As one selects each headline, the full text of the note appears in a large window that dominates the right-hand side of the display.
Consider the implications. When the phone rings, you open a note and type in the caller’s name and any information you want. The next time you get a call from that person, you tap a couple of keys, and the note pops up for further input.
Each note looks like a document in a word processor. You can change the fonts and color them. A built-in spell checker can watch your input in real time, underlining misspellings in those same wavy red lines made famous by Microsoft Word.
Images can be inserted into documents, as can more sophisticated elements such as bits of a spreadsheet and hot links to Web sites. When your computer is connected to the Internet, the software not only calls up Web sites but also handles your e-mail.
An ingenious display system of expandable topics and subtopics keeps the screen display manageable no matter how many notes get created.
Info Select’s most important feature is that one can perform so-called Boolean searches to quickly scan the entire database and call up relevant notes by keywords. These searches take the blink of an eye, and you’ve got what you need.
The idea is that Info Select becomes the centerpiece of each session at the computer. It’s a note taker, a word processor, a Web browser, an image editor and much more. Multiple calendars can be created to track work and home life separately. There are audible and screen-flashing alerts and recurring event features.
You can use the software to create templates like letterhead or custom forms such as “While you were out” phone notes and order forms. These can be sent to the printer for snail mail or popped into e-mail messages. Every letter you write and every memo you fire off gets kept in a database ready for access by keyword search.
For those who need more discipline, Info Select can create structured databases such as address lists that can be used to print up mass mailings as diverse as your Christmas cards or a flier to customers.
As time passes, you’ll find yourself getting drawn ever more into this software.
If you are writing a document–a computer column, for example–it goes in a note that is duly time stamped and headlined.
If you encounter something on the Internet worth keeping, you just paint the words in your Web browser, and they get pasted into Info Select as a new note.
It also can operate your scanner, permitting you to import documents as still more notes. If your scanner uses text recognition, you can suck the words right off a printed page into your collection of searchable notes. If you scan in images, the software will archive them for quick recall. There even is an image-tweaking module that can dramatically reduce the size of the files created by memory-devouring pictures.
I have written books in Info Select. Each chapter becomes a different note. As the book grows, the other tools in Info Select come into play, particularly the ability to search through a giant manuscript. The designers at Midland Park, N.J.-based Micro Logic Corp. take particular pride in how they employed ultrafast machine language to create the indexes that make the searching all but instantaneous.
With Info Select, your omnibus personal database grows evermore, both in size and in value. In some ways it’s frightening. As you use it, your computer takes on a definite personality–yours. Check it out at www.miclog.com.
———-
Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim or e-mail jcoates1@aol.com. Snail mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611
