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First Look: InfoSelect 8 excels as a tool for storing, organizing your ideas
By Chuck Frey
Micro Logic's goal for InfoSelect has always been to enable its users to manage all of their information -- notes, images, e-mails, schedules, contacts, ideas, plans and other types of data -- in one place. With the recent introduction of InfoSelect version 8, this program has moved significantly closer to realizing that ideal.
In this "first look" article, I will give you a brief overview of the new and improved features of InfoSelect 8, with a special emphasis on those that make it well-suited for use as a personal idea journal.
What is InfoSelect?
For those of you who may not be familiar with this program, InfoSelect combines the best features of a word processor, a free-form database and a personal information manager into a single, powerful application. InfoSelect enables you to record, capture, manipulate and organize many different kinds of text-based information, quickly and easily.
InfoSelect's two-pane interface makes it easy to organize content to suit your needs. The left panel, called the selector, contains headings for your notes and items, arranged in a hierarchical outline format. Each heading or item in the selector corresponds to a document window that is displayed in the larger right-hand panel of the InfoSelect's well-organized display.
One of the strengths of InfoSelect is that it literally invites you to enter notes, ideas and information in a free-form format. You can then reorganize and rearrange them later with complete freedom.
To create a new note, you simply click the new note icon in the program's toolbar. A new blank topic appears in the selector. Type in a name for your note and press the enter key. InfoSelect saves the title of your note in the selector window, and opens up a new, blank note in the workspace, which you can immediately begin typing into. Nothing could be simpler.
Once you have added a note or other content to InfoSelect, you can easily drag its title from one location to another in the selector window. This model of capturing and organizing information is both powerful and liberating, because it lets you focus on recording ideas, without getting in the way of your creative "flow."
Notable features of InfoSelect 8
With each new version, InfoSelect just keeps getting better and better. Here are some of the most notable capabilities of InfoSelect 8:
Context-sensitive toolbars: One of the ways that Micro Logic has improved the usability of InfoSelect 8 is by incorporating context-sensitive toolbars. And one of the places where this is most helpful is in the notes window of the program. The notes toolbar appears only when you're actually editing a note; otherwise, it disappears from view, helping to minimize screen clutter -- very nice!
Advanced text formatting: InfoSelect 8 now supports advanced text formatting, including bullets, subscripts, superscripts, text highlighting and more. Also, the program includes a spell checker and a thesaurus, making it well-suited to the needs of writers.
Edit text files from within InfoSelect: New in this version is the ability to open and edit a variety of files within InfoSelect. In other words, you can use it as an editor for files that are stored on your hard disk. Formats supported include text (TXT) and rich text (RTF) formats, comma- and tab-delimited records and a variety of image formats. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t support higher-end file formats like documents produced by Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. This limits its usefulness, but still it’s good to see Micro Logic thinking “outside the box” with this capability!
Intelligent management of the selector and notes windows: In InfoSelect 8, the width of the selector and the notes window changes automatically, so you always have an optimum view of what you're working on. This was always an area of frustration for me with past versions of InfoSelect: I'd have to experiment with different selector and note widths, until I found a combination that I liked.
New divider tool: InfoSelect 8 includes a new divider tool, which enables you to insert a horizontal line to divide your topics in the selector window into sections. For example, you could use a divider to separate your ideas from your other notes.
New drawing feature: InfoSelect 8 now enables you to create graphical drawings, such as diagrams, sketches, graphical ideas or street maps, directly in a note. Sometimes your ideas come to you in visual form, so the addition of this capability to InfoSelect is a big plus!
Improved handling of e-mail: If you're using InfoSelect as a personal knowledge base, e-mail is probably becoming a more important source of information that you may want to capture and save. InfoSelect 8 includes improved capabilities for importing e-mail messages fromMicrosoft Outlook, plus the ability to import messages from Eudora, another popular e-mail program.
Web page views: You can integrate views of web pages into your personal information base. Select Insert/Web page and the program inserts an MSIE-compatible browser window into the workspace. Type the site's address into the address bar, and you now have an "active" bookmark to that web page.
Conclusion
I have been a fan of InfoSelect for a long time, and I have always been amazed by how easy it enables me to capture, organize and retrieve information. With version 8, Micro Logic has been a very good job of improving a number of InfoSelect's existing features, while adding other new capabilities that enable you to capture a wider range of the bits and pieces of important information you come in contact with on a daily basis. This means that it's more practical than ever for knowledge workers to practically "live" in InfoSelect. You can also use the program as your primary e-mail program, calendar and to do list. You can not only use InfoSelect 8 for building your personal knowledge base, but also to use it to write reports, record meeting notes, create correspondence and other common tasks for which you would normally use a word processing program.
As a tool for capturing your ideas, insights, wisdom and knowledge, InfoSelect is still without peer.
The price of InfoSelect 8 is $249.95 for new users; if you are already using an earlier version of the program, you can upgrade for only $99.95. You can also license the program as a one-year subscription for $49.95, which gives you access to all updates to InfoSelect for a period of one year.
Published on 5/6/2004
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