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Find: Not a Great Collector's Item

Database program costs only $40 but is hard to learn and not very flexible.

Lincoln Spector, special to PC World

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Can you list all of your books, find out which CD contains a particular song, or quickly bring up every scanned photo of your daughter? CenturionSoft's Find is a small and inexpensive program that promises to help you organize your collections. But its steep learning curve and missing features will probably keep you disorganized.

To start off, Find doesn't follow Windows' basic user interface rules. Right-clicking doesn't get you anything. There's no way to move between records with keyboard commands. Basically, all the little shortcuts you've learned are useless in this database.

And it's no pick-up-and-use program. It took me an hour to figure out the "easy" way to enter new records, which involves clicking the Archive button ("Archive," to CenturionSoft, means edit), entering your data, clicking the "Save all data" icon, then clicking Yes. (If you click No, you change an existing record rather than create a new one.) If you move on to another record without clicking "Save all data," you lose what you entered without so much as a warning.

On the plus side, once you've entered your data, Find will help you find the items you're looking for. Do you want to see which videos in your collection star Tom Hanks? Enter his name in the Star field, click an icon, and there you are.

But these searches are limited. If you want the films with Tom Hanks that don't include Meg Ryan, you're out of luck. Also, there's no way to make sure your data entry is consistent enough for good filtering. For instance, there's nothing to stop you from entering a photo's location as "NY," "New York," or "Manhattan," making it difficult later to bring them all together.

Under Your Thumbnails--Sort Of

There's no better use for this type of program than organizing digitized photos. To help you examine your pictures, Find offers a nice-looking thumbnail view. You can look at 12 small images at a time, then double-click on one to get a closer look.

But the thumbnail and blow-up views exist totally separate from anything else in your database. You can't pick a thumbnail and go to the corresponding database record, or get the picture's file name, or print the image. (You can look at images in other views, but only one at a time.)

If you need software to help you organize a photo collection, keep looking. You'll find something better.

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