For this week’s FreewareFrenzy, I’m examining EssentialPIM 1.8. In case you haven’t read it before, PIM stands for Personal Information Manager. As the name implies, the program handles your day to day schedule, To Do lists and contact information. If you are sick of carrying around a day planner or have a case of sticky-notes-everywhere-itis, take a look at EPIM. It could simplify your hectic life.
EssentialPIM is easy to setup, and even checks for updates. When you first open it you see four main areas. The five categories on the left, the main window in the center which changes depending on the category you are working in, the “New…” buttons in the upper right, and the calendar in the lower right corner. Let’s take a closer look at the four main sections; Schedule, To Do, Notes and Contacts.
In the Schedule you use buttons on the right side to customize your viewpoint from a single day to a full year calendar. At the day level, the hours are broken into thirty minute segments. Double-click at any time to enter Task information, including a subject, times and duration, priority level, completion level (in 25% increments), category, text to explain a task in detail, reminders and repeat tasks. Categories are color coded; red is important, blue is business, green is personal, etc. You can use the handy buttons on the right to Add, Edit, Delete, Go to Date, and Find Text to quickly work through a hectic and/or long term schedule
The To Do list appears as a table, so you can sort through it easily. Adding a new To Do item is similar to a scheduled task, with options for times, notes, categories, and reminders. The To Do area is a place for general reminders instead of items with specific times and dates. If you find that a reminder has become a more important task, hit the Save As Task button to send the item to a date on the Schedule calendar.
Notes is the place for even more general information. The notes are stored as folders in a tree, so you can organize related notes. You can also use the buttons to move folders up and down the list, as well as in or out of other folders. Next to the tree is a simple text editor for capturing a simple phrase or laying out a whole report.
Contacts allow you to add a plethora of information for all of the people you do business with in your personal and professional lives. Using four tabs; Personal, Business, Notes and Picture, you can easily store names and numbers. The default fields for name, address, email etc will be sufficient for most, but you can add or edit a field if you need. You can also sort your contact list by any field or use Find to search through hundreds of entries quickly.
EssentialPIM also lets you save your databases if you need to keep certain groups and lists separate. You can password protect a database to keep information from prying eyes and you can compact large databases for easier transport. EssentialPIM can also be run entirely from a USB flash drive, so you can carry your information with you anywhere you go. EPIM also allows for Importing and Exporting from other sources. You can import data from iCal or Outlook, and export information to text, html, iCal and Outlook. Lastly, you can print your schedule to take a hard copy on the run. Printing was the only place I had trouble with EssentialPIM. The Print Preview opens in Internet Explorer, instead of the program itself. EPIM gave me an “Unknown Error” when Avant Browser was my default. A quick switch of the default browser to IE and all was well.
EssentialPIM contains everything a good PIM program needs. It is an easy way to store contacts and information, as well as schedule our increasingly busy lives. The program does have a paid Pro version which offers increased customization, assigned tasks, better encryption and more synchronization options, should any of that be important to you. But I found that EssentialPIM Free is more then capable of handling my needs. If you’re on the look out for a PIM program, check this out. http://www.essentialpim.com/?r=download
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