 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Visual Day Planner 6.3 Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au |
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Visual Day Planner (VDP) is an attractive-looking calendar with a basic set of features. As you'd expect, it offers daily, weekly and monthly views, and handles recurring events and alarms. A nice touch is the ability to set a calendar as your wallpaper, updating it automatically when you exit the calendar. It's very easy to use - just click on a date and start typing away; if you wish, add a picture or two from the Pictures tab on the left of the screen. Customise calendars further by using different fonts, font colours and so on. Put 'empty' spaces in the calendar to good use by using them for notes and memos.
VDP is network-enabled, so you can share calendars across a workgroup. It's not as sophisticated as many other calendars on the market, lacking features such as scheduling, and requiring users to maintain a separate calendar for private use.
VDP's main strength is that it is very much a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program with all features easily accessible. You won't find yourself facing a long learning curve, nor will you get bogged down in features you'll never use. It also has very modest hardware requirements.
While I found VDP simple to use and mostly intuitive, I struck a few problems, mainly with recurring events. Sometimes it hung half-way through the process, and it always discarded without warning recurring events which I had entered with 2-digit years. At one point, I inadvertently set a recurring event to occur every day for a year and became stuck with it; each time I tried to delete the event, VDP crashed. Dates are awkward to enter in the recurring events dialog box, and when my system resources got low, all my picture icons disappeared, never to reappear again even after rebooting.
Cost and Availability
US$29.95. Internet registration entitles users to a free CD containing a selection of clipart, icons, fonts, wallpapers and desktop themes. Download an evaluation copy from http://www.inklineglobal.com.
Minimum System Requirements
486 processor, 8 MB RAM, 12 MB free hard disk space.
Reprinted from the February 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
