Review: Digita's Organiser v2

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                       REVIEW: Digita's Organiser v2
                            By:  William Near 
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Have you ever forgotten an important birthday, anniversary, project
deadline, or possibly a school paper due date?  If it's one of the former
then you will never hear the end of it from the family member or loved one
whose birthday or anniversary you forgot -- if it's one of the latter then
you may lose your job or find that your grade has fallen due to your
forgetfulness.  Maybe it's just an important address that has slipped your
mind or you need to know what magnitude the star Betelgeuse has in the
Orion constellation!  Enter Digita's Organiser with the answer to all your
prayers.

Digita's Organiser is a combination address book, calendar, daily diary and
task manager all rolled into one neat package.  When you start up the
Organiser program you are presented with a screen that resembles a daily
planner opened to a yearly calendar with a set of icons running across the
top and down the left hand side of the screen.  Click tabs for Calendar,
Diary, Tasks, Addresses and Supplements are located on the side of the
current page.

Clicking on any one of the days in a particular month will instantly take
you to the diary page for that day.  From here you can enter a specific
event for that day or just browse that day's events.  If you decide to
enter an event then you simply click on the diary event detail's icon and
enter the information that is required for that specific event.  The
information that may be entered consists of any single one or combination
of: title, notes, priority, end date, start and end time, alarm, repeat
frequency, and auto start options.  You could, for instance, set an
important meeting's starting and ending time along with important notes
associated with that meeting and have the Organiser remind you a week, or
even a day, before the meeting's date.  You can even have the Organiser
automatically start up a word processor or make a backup of your hard drive
on a specified date by using the auto start feature.  Once you have entered
all the information into the diary event's requestor you can either exit
this process or enter another day's events into the Organiser.  When
finished, all the information you have entered will be inserted into the
correct dates in the Organiser's Diary.

There are four views for Diary, Task, and Address pages depending on
whether you want to see one, three, four, or seven day's listings per page
on the screen.  There is also an "at a glance" icon that toggles between
just showing the first line of information or all lines of information per
event on each day in the Organiser.  Flipping to the next or preceding page
in the Organiser is as easy as clicking on the lower outside edge of either
the left or right hand page currently displayed.  Deleting or repeating a
specific event is only a mouse click away, so is the option to search for a
specific field or other data contained in a particular day's listing of
events.  An undo option has also been included.

Another feature of the Organiser is the entry of Tasks.  Tasks can be
anything you'd like them to be, such as a report that is due on a certain
date.  You simply enter the pertinent data for the task at hand and the
Organiser will insert it into the due date.  When the task's due date has
past, the task will turn red in the Organiser and the number of days that
the task is overdue will be displayed.  There is also a check box which you
can click in once the task is completed.  This can be very handy when
having many tasks due on the same day.

The Address book feature of the Organiser is just like the type you will
find in the local supermarket.  The letters of the alphabet appear in click
tabs down the right hand side of the screen.  Clicking on any one of the
letters will take you to the specified page in the Address book.  Entering
address information is a simple process of clicking on an icon and entering
the information in a requestor.  My only complaint about this area of the
Organiser is that it is geared with the UK and Europe in mind.  There is no
entry area for a state instead there is an area for county and country!  I
just used the county area to enter the state for the address. 

A link feature has been implemented whereby you can link related items
together.  You could, for example, link an address to a birthday and then
have the Organiser remind you to buy a birthday present.

The final area of the Organiser are the Supplements.  Supplements are those
sometimes handy pages of a daily planner that contain such things as:
weights and measures, important holidays, first aid procedures, etc.  
While the Organiser comes with loads of such information, the majority of
it is again geared towards the UK and Europe.  Information specific to
North American is very sparse.  While many of the included Supplements are
quite informative they are wasted on most North American users of the
Organiser.

The Organiser also offers a printing feature that can be used to print out
any of the section's information in a whole plethora of options.  Digita
seems to have thought of every conceivable way that you may want to print
the information contained in the pages of the Organiser, including mailing
labels!  I did find one glitch in the printing process, however.  If the
printer is not turned on when you click the print icon then the Organiser
program seems to have a hard time dealing with this.  The usual
resume/cancel print requestor will pop up via AmigaDOS, but clicking on
cancel will not halt the process.  Clicking on the Organiser's stop button
in the print window seems to have no apparent effect either.  I was
effectively locked out of the program -- only a reboot seemed to remedy
this!

Context-sensitive on-line help is just a press of the HELP key or click of
an icon away.  The Amigaguide help function is very thorough and easy to
understand.  A tutorial section is also included.

Digita's Organiser seems to be a very complete package for the
businessperson, student, or just plain old Joe who wants to keep track of
important dates and events in their lives.  My only gripes would be the
lack of North American Supplements, the annoying way of entering the day
and then the month (although you can enter it as month-day, but the program
will automatically reverse them in the requestor) in the event requestor,
and the lack of a state entry area in the address book.  They also need to
look into the printing problem I pointed out earlier.  If Digita would
release a new version with the above suggestions implemented (why not ask
what country the user lives in when installing Organiser and implement the
appropriate data entry layout and Supplements?) then they would have an
absolute winner in this category on the Amiga platform.  As it stands,
Digita's Organiser is a nearly perfect product.

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