Labels:text | screenshot | gold | amber OCR: ACT! for Windows by Tony Curro Many of us have business cards from our contacts. We usually stuff them in our wallet or place them in our desk drawer. Others may have a card organizer to keep them all in one place. Sometimes we still cannot find a card we need, or have to rummage through the desk to find it. ACT! for Windows will solve that problem. ACT! has been around for several years, and has become very popular. Contact Software has recently entered the Windows market with this release. It requires 2.5MB of hard disk space and 2MB RAM (4MB RAM recommended). ACT does more than just store business card information. It is a Contact Manager and Day Planner. Among its features are: Word Processor, Activity Scheduler, Report Generator, To-Do List Manager and Auto Dialer. All facets of the program are interactive with each other. So if you enter a contact in a business card you can also have a reminder telling you to follow up a call or letter. Once you follow up with a letter, you can save it as part of the contacts' history. This way you will know when you called or wrote, and the outcome of these events. After you print a document ACT asks if the document is a finished document that you plan to send out. If you choose yes, it will insert a ecord of the letter in the history of the contact record. History feature is important as it keeps tracks of all your activities for each contact. For example, when you write a letter with ACT's WP, it records the date and time that you printed the letter, notes the filename of the letter, and stores all this into the history file for that contact. Each contact has their own history file, which can be viewed or printed whenever you wish. Suppose you have several contacts from the same company. ACT will allow you to copy over all the information from the first card to the next, except for the person's name and number. Then you just enter the next person's information without having to input all the same company nformation. ACT comes with 20 macros to simplify many tasks, from opening a new database, bolding, spell checking, save and more. There are three manuals included that are: Getting Started, User's Guide, and Reference Manual. The Guide has an in-depth tutorial and other features and uses of the program to get you going very quickly. The Reference Manual contains a concise, encyclopedia-style (A-Z) reference of all the ACT features and functions. In addition it provides step-by-step instructions for specific tasks To utilize the scheduler feature of ACT, you should add it to the STARTUP Group, or to the LOAD= line of your WIN. INI file. Even if ACT is minimized, it will sound an alarm at the time specified, and will cause the icon to flash. This is repeated every 15 seconds until you acknowledge the alarm. Appointments can be set for up to two years. Upon first starting ACT and creating a new database, you are prompted to enter your own personal information. This information is used when you write letters and other things. You do not have to enter the opening, salutation or closing of the letter. The contact information is picked up from the top card, and your information is provided from your personal information. You just type the body of the letter, print it, and sign it. There is also a mail merge option that will send the same letter to every contact in a database. When you elect to write to a person, you do NOT have to send a letter. You can create a FAX cover sheet, memo, or select from a list of templates to do envelopes and more. There are several different view modes in ACT. These allow you to see different types of cards. They also have USER defined fields. You can customize a user defined field to have any label you desire ACT allows wildcard searches, and allows you to search by company, first name, last name, city, state, zip, keyword and more Using ACT you can call a contact using your modem. ACT will tell you to pick up the phone. In this way ACT will record the information in the history file, so you know when you last called, and the outcome of, the conversation. Using setup you can schedule calls and follow ups to make to a contact ACT also has a notepad, which you can popup to enter miscellaneous nformation about a contact. There are also popup menus for: Title, Phone, City, State, Zip and so on. Rather then having to enter a person's title each time, you can add it to, or edit the menu and it will always be there or your use. Same applies to all the other popup menus. The first thing in the morning you can bring up the Task List. This shows you all appointments and activities for the day, a specific day, or all the days you have appointments. Of course you can also print this information out. While ACT! for Windows is a powerful program, it is also flexible, and very easy to use. The learning curve is not that large, and most people should be up and running very quickly. Program Information ACT? for Windows List Price $495 Contact Software 1840 Hutton Drive Suite 200 Carrollton, TX 75006 214-919-9500
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