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Fax From Your PC

Sometimes you have to forego e-mail or the Web and use a more arcane method of delivering information--you have to fax it. If you do a lot of faxing, and handling all those incoming and outgoing faxes has become a major hassle, consider investing $100 in Symantec's WinFax Pro 10.02.

True, a cheap fax machine costs less than $100, and Windows comes with its own basic Fax program (except Windows ME). But WinFax has some tricks up its sleeve for the frequent faxer that neither a basic fax program nor a physical fax machine can handle. You can drag and drop a file onto a desktop icon to fax it, and attach multiple files to a fax to have them all go out together. There's a junk-fax filter. If you'd rather have received an e-mail than a fax, there are OCR capabilities to turn the bitmapped image into editable text. Best of all is the signature feature that helps you "sign" a letter by stamping a bitmap of your own signature to it before faxing it out. (Note: You do need to have a fax-modem installed for WinFax to work. Check out Symantec's system requirements for more details.)

Not all of WinFax's special features are really useful, though. The photo-quality faxes don't look noticeably different from the regular ones. Plus, WinFax hogs memory on some systems. But for heavy-duty PC faxing, WinFax is a good investment.

Organize Your E-Mail

Why can't I find Edna's e-mail about the Entropy Project? Wait a minute--maybe Edwina sent that? Okay, where is it?

If you're overwhelmed by e-mail, and you use Microsoft Outlook, consider Nelson Email Organizer 2.5 (also known as NEO). This $40 Outlook add-on by Caelo Software offers seven tabs with different views of your e-mail. You can click the Correspondent tab to see your mail organized by sender. Bulk Mail has messages that weren't actually addressed to you. Go to the Status tab for unread or tagged e-mail, and Date View for mail that arrived today or last month. The Hot tab has your priority folders, whatever they may be. (Note: Microsoft's new version of Outlook provides a lot of these features, so if you are planning to upgrade to the newer version of Office when the time comes, you may not need to purchase NEO.)

Since NEO doesn't store the mail separately, but works with mail already stored in Outlook, there's no problem with the two programs getting out of sync. No, it doesn't work with Outlook Express.

Organize Everything

Creo's Microsoft Outlook add-on, the $100 Six Degrees 1.5, helps you organize a whole lot more than e-mail. In addition to requiring Outlook, Six Degrees works only in Windows 2000 or XP.

Six Degrees watches what you do in Outlook, then it finds relationships between different items, which it displays in its own window. Click an e-mail message or an appointment in Outlook (but not, alas, a task or a note), and Six Degrees will list anything it thinks might be related to it. And it doesn't just watch Outlook. If you click a file in Windows Explorer--say, your notes for an upcoming presentation--the resulting list may include e-mails about the presentation, the appointment itself, and other files containing similar keywords.

Of course, it's all guesswork, and Six Degrees doesn't always guess right. But it guesses right often enough to be useful if you have trouble keeping track of all your data relating to specific projects.

Make the Ultimate Outline

Now that I've shown you some better ways to organize your Outlook data, how about something to replace Outlook altogether?

Micro Logic's $150 personal information manager, Info Select Version 7, is laid out in an outline format. You enter bits of information under headers like Reports and References. You can create your own headers and subheaders, as well. Under some of these headers, you'll find forms for entering structured information such as contact databases. In others, you can just enter unstructured notes, then impose a structure based on where you place them in the outline. There's also an appointment calendar and e-mail client to make it a full PIM.

It's also handy for Web research. Highlight text in your browser (or any other program), click a system tray icon, and that text becomes a note beneath the highlighted topic in InfoSelect.

If you've got a Palm-based PDA, you can buy a separate $70 version, Info Select for Palm. The two sync up, letting you enter and organize data while sitting at your PC or on the run. The program isn't offered for Pocket PC-based PDAs.

Info Select is a bit intimidating at first--you should start at either the Easy or Basic level. But if you have to manage a wide range of disparate data types, it's a big help. Especially useful is its very fast search engine, which brings together your organized and disorganized info.

Keep Tabs on Your Time

If you've got multiple clients and charge by the hour, you need a way to track what you do, how long you spend doing it, and for whom you're doing it. That's where Iambic's $150 TimeReporter 4.0 comes in.

Setting up TimeReporter can be time-consuming and a bit of a challenge. It uses either an SQL or Access database, and if you have neither you may have to download Microsoft Data Access Components (or MDAC) first.

To get started, you need to log on by name to set up TimeReporter. Then you have to enter some basic information--clients, tasks, categories, rates, and so on. But once your key information is entered, the program is pretty easy to use. You just click selections and enter a bit of text to record what you did and when. Or use the Start and Stop buttons at the beginning and end of a chore.

Of course, you may not do all of your chores at your computer. That's why Iambic includes a Palm version of TimeReporter in the package. The desktop and the Palm versions, of course, sync together. (Sorry, nothing for Pocket PC operating systems.)