Day-Timer
By Bob Morris, Diablo Valley Mac User Group
If you have ever used the pocket version of Day-Timers, the Day-Timer Organizer
2.03 program is a direct and all-but-exact copy of the familiar green-ink and
paper version of the pocket calendar, organizer and address book made by
Day-Timer, Inc. You get daily, weekly or monthly calendars and to-do lists that
can be broken down into smaller pieces as required. You can assign work to
various groups or individuals and then find either the work, the group or the
individual through the program's search options. In the Address Book area, you
have the usual name, address, title, phone number fields, but you also have six
phone number entries, plus another four e-mail numbers, which can be entered
for each individual. In addition, you can create your own custom entries for
either individuals or globally.
Day-Timer Organizer 2.03 from Day-Timer Technologies in San Mateo, CA is your
typical Mac program. The manual is only a marginal requirement even for a
novice. However, the manual is quite complete with lots of explanations about
the parts and pieces of the program. If you have used your Mac for more than
about two weeks, the manual will quickly gather dust on the shelf, just like
your other Mac manuals. The program is very intuitive. The graphics on the
selection buttons and user windows are very understandable. Nevertheless, a
nice feature of the manual, itself, that you may use for the first few days, is
the back cover. It shows all the major buttons and indicates what they do. A
good quick reference.
Through the Day-Timer, you can dial phone calls and track them for billing
purposes. And as long as you’re keeping track of the cost of phone calls, you
also have a complete Expense Tracking section which you can custom organize.
And again, you can do all this personally, by group, or by activity.
Day-Timer allows you to easily schedule events, meetings or follow-ups with
visual and audible alarms. You simply set the date, the beginning and ending
times and give a description of the event in the Schedule window. Changes are
equally easy by adding or moving with drag and drop. You can enter and view
ongoing weekly, monthly or other regularly occurring events and then view your
various schedules by day, by week or by month with an easy touch of one button.
Any of these may be printed in a number of formats including pages that match
and fit into your pocket Day-Timer. You can also print out mailing labels and
envelopes and even order calendar pages for printing that are pre-drilled to
fit directly into ring binders of various sizes.
Finally, like most companies today, when you call technical assistance, you go
through a long voicemail system before arriving at a real person. The person I
spoke to, however, was very helpful and worth the wait. I called to inquire
about a message that appeared following my testing the phone/modem dialer and
then trying to send e-mail. The message said, in effect, that the port selected
was currently in use by another application (Day-Timer) and that I could either
override or cancel. When I called tech. support, they said this was a bug that
will be fixed in their next update, due out soon. If you don't use the phone
dialer, the problem is of no consequence. If you do, a simple restart solves
the problem. No big deal.
If you need to keep track of people, times, dates, phone numbers, address,
e-mail numbers, expenses or other details of your life, the Day-Timer program
is an easy way to do it. It’s that or small scraps of paper in the bottom of
your pockets. Retail price quoted is $79.95; street price around $59.95. Both
network and personal programs are available.
Copyright Nancy Kieffer. Permission is given to print in Mac User Group
newsletters if one copy of the newsletter is sent to Nancy Kieffer, Diablo
Valley Mac User’s Group, P.O. Box 5031, Concord, CA 94524. Contact Nancy
Kieffer for permission if you wish to use it for any other purpose.
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