TaskMerlin is well-designed, and it follows Windows interface guidelines perfectly. However, casual users should note that it is not a "lite" or "E-Z" program. There's a lot of stuff here: a lot of features, functionalities, options, and possibilities. And while this is good, it can be a bit stunning at first. I had to read the Help file to figure out how to add a user and assign a document to him. Once I knew where to click, of course, it was pretty simple.

There's a lot of flexibility and customizability here. You can create new types of documents or priorities (such as "I Need It Yesterday!"). However, this feature is not available in the trial version. You can customize the views to include a wide variety of columns. For each aspect of a data element, there are a plethora of fields to choose from, all of which can be used for searching or sorting. Over time, a user of TaskMerlin will develop quite a library of customized data labels to suit their personal needs.

The program includes a flexible text editor for each 'document', or data item, in your project. This is a very nice touch, and expands TaskMerlin from just being a project planning tool to being an outline-style database in and of itself. Documents can include graphics, checkboxes, and hyperlinks to other documents or to the Web.

Overall, TaskMerlin is full-featured and inexpensive. It does not hide its complexity, but shows it openly. If you can overcome the sudden shock of just how much data you can enter and just focus on the essentials, you may find this a powerful, useful, tool.

--Ian Harac