Good journal program?

Posted by Bob Mackreth
Jan 1, 2008 at 04:58 PM

Tom Nantais wrote:

>I was wondering if anyone knows of a good journal
>program for Windows. I’m looking for something really simple with a couple of
>must-have features: automatic time stamping, a tag field for each journal entry, a
>tag filter with a full set of boolean operators, a grid control that can show entries
>sorted reverse chronologically, free-form text search, and an open file format. It
>would also be nice to be able to group tags into categories. Does such a thing
>exist?

Interesting that you should ask this right now- I’m wrestling with the same question myself. I don’t know of anything that meets all of your criteria, but I’m sure there are others who know far more than I do, and I will be watching this thread closely.

I’ve been using ECCO to keep my journal for years, but have finally felt the urge to look for something more up-to-date. Having recently decided, despite some misgivings, to migrate day-to-day PIM operations to Outlook 2007, I’m looking for something that integrates more closely with Outlook.

Some thoughts-

Essential PIM has a very nice Notes function that would make a dandy journal.

“The Journal” looks like a very interesting piece of software, but it appears to be more elaborate for my purposes.

Right now I’ve narrowed my own choices down to either MyInfo or Evernote.

MyInfo is a great Swiss Army Knife sort of info manager, and could certainly be employed very effectively for a journal. You’d have all the tagging and search capability you could ask for. I use it for dozens of other functions, so why not one more? The downside is that MyInfo is slow to open and to save, giving it a somewhat unwieldy feeling that’s not conducive to jotting down quick thoughts. Also, as a 2-pane outliner, you can only look at one entry at a time. I’m used to quickly scanning down the page in ECCO, and hate to give up that convenience.

I’m not a huge Evernote fan overall, because I find its “tape roll” design limiting, and the general interface way too quirky and inconvenient to use. However, it is a powerful program, and a journal is one task where the toilet paper paradigm actually does seem to make sense. Throw in its excellent categorization capability, and I think Evernote has real potential for my purposes.