EfficientPIM review

The world of personal information management software can be a strange one.
Wandering through the various solutions that developers have come up with, you meet some pretty bizarre applications – contorted logic and peculiar terminology, colour schemes from hell and interfaces that predate Windows 3.1. Some try to lock you into the author’s world view and others so unstructured, they barely seem to offer any management.

Then, in a breathe of fresh air, you come across a PIM like EfficientPIM.

I am looking for a candidate to replace my old PIM which is no longer actively supported and Efficient PIM is the current frontrunner because…

Briefly, it offers tools for managing

• Schedules, events and tasks
• Contacts
• Notes -folder tree, diary and desktop stickies
• Passwords
• Links to sites

See http://www.downloadtube.com/EfficientPIM-demo-installation-windows.html for a video demonstrating the major features of the program and of course, you can explore it for yourself by downloading a trial version from the maker’s site at http://www.efficientpim.com

My opinion of this program

Things I really like about EfficientPIM

• It minimises to the system tray – essential to keep it handy but not obstrusive
• It imports holidays for a range of different countries (mine did the Aussie holidays automatically)
• Extensive interface customisation – both for the prominence of various buttons and for individual field in records
• Extensive import facilities
• Even though it uses a proprietary file format, you can export your data to something more generic
• The Today feature and the ability to customise its content is great
• It has a trash system, so that you don’t have to hard delete items
• Searches can be conducted globally or module by module (mmm, tasty)
• It handles attachment and file link
• The spellchecker has the ability to use a customisable dictionary
• Autobackup is nice
• The password generator is a nice touch
• It seems to make modest memory demands on my XP and Vista machines

Things that need to added/fixed

• needing to use csv or txt format in order  to import favs/bookmarks
• the lack of a simple  spreadsheet document type
• there isn’t a dedicated project feature
• lack of screenshots in the help file
• copying from web page then pasting to a note loses the formatting
• organising passwords into one list with tags instead of categories
• adding alarms to desktop notes

Overall:  I think it is a very useful program and a worthy candidate in the world of PIM software.