Publisher finds missing link

Desktop, PDA, Reviews, Software

Just thought you’d want to know, you of PDA fame, that there is no reason to lose your RV’s anymore.

Although I am working on an even better system, let me tell you how a $20 bill could change your life forever.

If you already have Outlook from Microsoft, PhatNotes 5.2 is a shade under $20. If you don’t, then PhatNotes has to do more work on its own but it is still a very reasonable $40.00.

Here’s what you get:

A module for your PC, a matching module for your PDA (Pocket PC, SmartPhone, Tablet), easy connectivity using ActiveSync on XP or the built in synch on Vista.

But you also get something else … a perpetually sorted RV list in which the territory number is ordered in an ascending fashion and the house address is ordered in descending order. The HH name is also visible.

Here’s how I use the provided fields:

Category = Territory number (bonus! on the PDA, when collapsed, it gives a count of the number of RV’s in that territory)

Subject = 99999 Streetname (HH name) (Pub Name if not my call)

Body = details of placements, etc.

A typical entry resembles this entirely mythical one:

Category: 17

Subject: 12345 Somestreet (Vera Alldid) (Davison)

04/08 WT / AW / Teach (Grown kids) Next 04/13/08, Ch. 2

It is easy to create additional databases as the need arises. The whole process (after the first one) takes about 2 minutes.

To any of these, I can add an alarm with some standard repeats and exercise several sorting options. Nothing too exotic, but for my purposes, almost everything I need is present with little extraneous clutter.

One of life’s little truisms is that ‘one size’ doesn’t ‘fit all’. But PhatNotes makes giant strides in that direction. There is a 30 day free trial … so take a look and see if it might not work for you.

(PS … I have no economic interest in this post. I spent an evening searching for appropriate software and this is what I came up with. I’ve used it for about two weeks and it looks like ‘a keeper’ to me. If you know of better software for this purpose, please speak up before I send these guys money! )

Br. Bill (Check me out!) @ April 20, 2008