Contact Plus Personal

Review by Lars Mathiassen, SharePaper

Is your John Doe a hot prospect? What are his home, car and work phone numbers, and when is the best time to call him? Has he bought anything lately? Or what about Joe Average? When did you last call him? And when do you p to call him again? What kind of company does he run? Well, as you probably understand, Contact Plus Personal helps you keep track of all these things.

Getting into applications like this often takes some time. Getting into Contact Plus Personal, one the other hand, is easy and doesn't require much time. It comes with a couple example databases, which are very handy whether or not you're going to create a database from scratch or just modify the existing ones to your needs. When you're creating databases from scratch, you can of course look at the existing ones to see how things are done.

Creating a database means defining fields to fill in later. Parts of the fields, like type and size are pre-defined, you only have to type in field descriptions etc. This of course makes the program a bit limited, but also a lot easier. There are a good many types of fields available, so you'll probably be able to do what you want.

You can do more than just storing data with Contact Plus Personal. Using data from the database in letters you write is possible. Microsoft Word 7.0/000, and WordPerfect 7.0/8.0/2000 are supported.

Contact Plus Personal has a few other nice features, too. Bring up the US map and type in your zip code, then select an entry from the database to calculate the distance. This map can also show telephone area codes and time zones. Or what do you say about this: Contact Plus Personal is Internet enabled, which means it can send customized commands to your Web browser. For example, if you're going to visit, say a customer in New York, you probably want to know how the weather is, and perhaps have a look at the local map of the location. Select it from a menu in Contact Plus Personal and get the local forecast and map in your default Web browser. Very easy. It comes with a few sites included, like the weather forecast and map, however, you can also define your own.

Contact Plus Personal has many more features than mentioned here, and more features than all other such programs I've looked at (haven't looked at very many, though, but a few). A few things can be a bit cumbersome, but it never becomes frustrating. If you're a sales person, or anyone else who needs to keep track of people, I'm sure you'll find Contact Plus Personal handy.