2023-08-06 Honolulu, Hawai`i: This article is over 20 years old and sadly out of date with respect to software products and even my own usage. "Some day" I may update it, but meanwhile perhaps the general principles discussed here are still of use. My email contact for this topic is now pimster@bobnewell.net. Quick note/sage advice, updated 2023-08-06, Honolulu, Hawai`i: If you want the ultimate and don't mind a long (seriously long) learning curve, set up EMACS and org-mode, and spend time with on-line tutorials, YouTube videos, etc., to learn this powerful tool set. I use EMACS/org-mode for everything from managing my calendar to reading email to writing novels (I've written eight novels in org-mode, in two different languages). I took theoretical math classes and did the homework with EMACS. I managed budget and taxes with the org-mode table and spreadsheet feature, interspersed with some Perl code and the org-mode "babel" feature. I used org-mode-babel to manage the finances of the Hawai`i Chess Federation when I was Treasurer back in the day. Today I run the business of a large condo complex with EMACS and org-mode. And on and on. If you take the time to get really good with these tools (perhaps as long as a year to become a real expert) you will be rewarded beyond your wildest beliefs. Agenda, and the PIMS of (My) History 1. Life as a Pimster. I've been something of a PIM fan-- perhaps a PIM freak-- for many years now. In fact, some time ago I coined a name for people with my particular problem: "Pimster." I can't say that I've been through them all, but I've been through a number of them. I go in cycles. I find a new one, and that becomes the Holy Grail. I use it for a while; I lavish extraordinary amounts of precious spare time upon it, falling behind in all the rest of my personal life, only in the end to abandon it as "not quite good enough" and go back to something tried and true-- which itself isn't quite good enough, either. So herewith follows a rambling recollection and analysis of some of the various and sundry PIMs that have haunted my waking and sleeping hours over the past decade. Yes, it's been that long. I'll eventually end up at Agenda, but that's some little ways down. 2. Scraps for DOS. For a while I used Scraps. Undoubtedly you have never heard of Scraps-- and if you have, I'd really like to talk with you at some length. Scraps was the product of Raymond Lowe of Hong Kong. It was a DOS application, and it was exceedingly clever and complete. Scraps used the motto "back up your brain." I loved it because it was the first free-form text database manager I'd come across that really worked. The metaphor for Scraps was, predictably, a scrap of paper. You entered something on the computer screen just as you would write it down on the proverbial matchbook cover, napkin, or back of an envelope. Scraps indexed by word. It was fast and convenient, even if a little fragile (the database had an unwelcome tendency to become corrupt without warning). But Scraps was more than this. Scraps had a calendar and appointment manager too. It was a bit rudimentary but it worked, and it had a nice monthly view which very clearly told you which time slots were filled and which were still available. There was also a to do list, which allowed for the attachment of an explanatory "scrap" to each item. Prioritization was simple and effective. Scraps also had a "paper tape" style calculator which allowed you to copy the results to a scrap; there was a program launcher which let you build a mini-menu of favorites, such as Word Star and others; and there were a few other features and nice touches. All in all, this was a wonderful productivity aid, fantastic for its time, compact and fast, and very good at what it did. Unfortunately, Y2K came along, and Scraps couldn't deal with it. While much of it kept running, the to-do list completely died, and I suspect some other features, such as the 'alarm' feature, didn't make it either. Still, I had used Scraps happily for many years and to this day I miss it, a least a little. If I could find Raymond Lowe (I've tried, alas, without success) I think I'd try to persuade him to fix it. Now, understand that I'm a serious retro-computing fan. I run the largest DOS retro-gaming BBS to be found (telnet://chungkuo.org) and I don't care very much for Windows. My machines at both home and office run Linux by preference, and I have several pure DOS machines still functioning. In fact, I'm writing this article with WordStar 5.5 on an Epson Equity II+ (a 286 machine), running DOS 6.2. I do have a few Windows machines, but I've capped them at Windows 98. I never have gotten into Windows $2000 or Windows Xtra Price. I hear that it takes somewhat heroic efforts to run DOS programs on these newer operating systems, but that's not my problem at the moment. Keep that in mind while reading the rest of this article. 3. Crossties for Windows. Somewhere along the way I read about Crossties, a Windows program that promised a unique approach-- and, in fact, delivered on that promise to a large degree. Now, at that time, while happily using Scraps, I was reading everything I could about PIMs. There was Ecco, PackRat, Shark, early shareware versions of Time and Chaos, Act!, and many more. But Crossties intrigued me with its cross-linking metaphor, and its ability to save large chunks of text with a given item. I ordered a copy and set to work. Crossties provided various information categories with the flexibility to create new ones (if I remember that bit correctly, at least). It proved only moderately difficult to import my Scraps database and start work. (Another "keep in mind" disclaimer: as an avid Linuxer, writing SED, AWK, and Perl scripts is just about second nature, and hours pass unnoticed. It probably took six or eight hours to import the Scraps data, but who's counting?) Crossties had some nice things. The appointment calendar was visually appealing and flexible. Crossties could act as a MAPI mail agent; my company was using MAPI based e-mail at the time, and this was just perfect. But the linking feature was great. For any given item in the database, any number of links could be established to other items in the database. In actual practice establishing links could be a bit awkward, as you had to find the link item first and then "drag and drop" to the target. When a category had a large number of entries, this might take a little time. But then you had all sorts of reciprocal views. All appointments for a person would show up when that person's record was viewed. So would the company affiliation. Similarly, a company record would have links to all person records pertaining to the company. So, what made me quit using Crossties? There were a few reasons. One is that the company went out of business. This is not a sufficient reason in and of itself, as there really wasn't much support in any event, but my workplace switched to SMTP mail, and Crossties never followed. And, I found the linking a bit unwieldy to use, and ultimately messy. Also, there wasn't a good to-do list mechanism. Items had to be moved forward manually, for example, if they weren't done on time. Finally, searching wasn't all that good. Exit Crossties. Enter something rather bizarre, but by now you've probably learned to expect that from me. Read on, if you will. 4. The EMACS Calendar and Diary. I went back to Scraps for a while, but fundamentally I wanted something very portable and rather simple. I wanted something that would port from Windows machines to Linux machines with little or no effort. I succeeded with the portable part, and as you've found, my definition of "little effort" leans to the generous side. Since about 1980, I had been an EMACS user. If you know about EMACS, you know that it is a religion. EMACS is "the one true editor" but it is hardly just a text editor. With its underlying programming language, ELISP (a very powerful version of the Lisp language), EMACS does all... or at least, can be made to do all. With some effort. "Some" is defined liberally. EMACS has a diary function and a rather advanced calendar function. If you want to convert from Hebrew to Mayan dates, the calendar will do that. The diary is pretty basic, being just a serial list of appointments and the means to provide a daily appointment list in a couple of formats. There is also an EMACS database, EDB, which combines attributes of structured fields and free-form text. And, there was something called "Hyperbole" which, as another EMACS add-on, provided an outliner, hypertext linking, and a few other features. Put all this together, and I found myself in PIM heaven. I was in the last stages of my Scraps career (portability was, as I said above, the latest of my burning issues). I was also interested in integration. For instance, as an outline maven, I had gone through ThinkTank, MaxThink, and PC Outline (all of them excellent, but that would be another whole article). But I was running these things separately, having to launch them from Scraps and then go back. (For some reason, I saw this as an issue. I will later recant.) Then there was the very powerful built-in EMACS calculator, and even a sort of spreadsheet for EMACS appropriately named "Dismal." EMACS surely seemed to have it all. And so off I went. I do not know, nor would I care to be told, how many hours I spent coding ELISP and putting everything together. I created a scraps-like database in EDB. I created a to-do list manager in EDB. I installed Hyperbole and added daily logs to my scraps database, with all sorts of hypertext linking between dates, the diary, and the rest of the scraps entries. I wrote macros to import e-mail (EMACS has many ways of reading SMTP e-mail too). I wrote macros to capture text on web pages (EMACS has a text mode web browser, to no surprise). I even extended the EMACS calendar, which already included Hebrew holidays, Torah readings, and candle-lighting times, to include Havdalah times and Daf Yomi readings (the later of which attracted at least a little external attention). Someone published a "calendar desk diary" extension and I installed that too. I used this system for years and year, and still was using it when I started writing this article. I've tried a lot of other things (as will be discussed forthwith) but I kept coming back to my home-grown system. What's good about it is that is very portable, very convenient, very fast, very familiar (to me at least), and infinitely extensible (as long as time spent is of no consequence). So what's wrong with this seeming paragon of PIMster-ness? Although I love it dearly, there are some real faults. The greatest fault, and it is fatal in and of itself, is that the system is really useless for helping to manage my day and manage my work. OK, I have a very good "scraps" system. Information is easy to enter and not too hard to find, if you are satisfied with listing one item at a time and going through those items serially. I have a nice book database, with the same merits and demerits. But the hypertext linking is awkward and fragile. Making changes to it means reprogramming at the ELISP level. The to-do list sits unused, because it isn't well linked to the calendar, the diary, or related scraps. In fact, the diary itself is seldom used. That has more to do with the way our office runs, but even so, it is difficult to view anything more than a single day in any kind of organized fashion. Of course, I suppose I could do some more programming... The integration, too, is largely a sham. While the EMACS calculator, and some of the fancy calendar features, are really nice, the spreadsheet is indeed dismal, the EDB database manager requires all sorts of ELISP programming to get the results you want, and the Web browser, checkbook balancer, etc.... who am I kidding? Just myself. Time to move on? Maybe. Let's look at some options, before we finally arrive at some discussion of Agenda... and my bottom line. 5. ECCO Pro. Of the many possibilities such as Act!, PackRat, etc., ECCO Pro is the only one I really looked at, and that look was not a particularly long or deep one. Hence, my comments are necessarily brief. What I did like about ECCO Pro is the outline metaphor, something I use often and with which I'm very comfortable. ECCO offers the usual appointment calendars and to-do lists, and means of storing information in a nice outline form. In fact, in ECCO everything is an outline, at least one level of it. An appointment can even be set up as a full, detailed outline in its own right. ECCO deals well with e-mail, and provides a number of features to make it feel like a "normal" planner and organizer, with heavy emphasis on building outline structures. But there was nothing I could find to seriously distinguish it. What it does, it does very well. But the "scraps" metaphor was something I don't wish to give up, and ECCO doesn't seem to handle non-structured, random information all that well. I know ECCO has a legion of fans and for the rabid outliner, ECCO is probably the way to go. But it just isn't for me. 6. Info Select. Now we're headed into some seriously interesting territory, as we approach a couple of the "New Age" information management tools. You must be told at the outset that Info Select was a keeper. I have it and I use it, at least for certain things. I shall explain in due course. Info Select combines an outline metaphor with a scraps metaphor, and does so very well. In addition, it handles e-mail to perfection, and has a calendar and scheduler function that is usable if nothing more. There are numerous other minor bells and whistles, but they aren't especially important to anyone other than Info Select marketeers. In Info Select, you build a hierarchical outline of information categories or "topics." You then enter bits of information into this structure in a "scraps" metaphor. The first line of the note, to use Info Select terminology, is used as the title (unless you change it) and shows up as a member of your outline. You can expand or collapse the outline, which appears at the left of the screen, at will. Nothing about this is as yet new or original. But here's where it gets interesting. When Info Select is started, a little lightning bolt appears in the system tray, down on the bottom right of your Windows screen. Now, go through some documents on your hard drive, browse the web, work on anything you like. When you find something of interest, "select" the text with your mouse or a "select all" operation or any way you wish. Click the lightning bolt and that information is transferred at once to a new note in Info Select. Rather cool and incredibly useful, especially for quickly gathering and saving information from the Web. (There's one problem; the new note appears in your hierarchy wherever you last left off, so notes can appear in strange places. You'll then have to move them around to where you really might want them. Not a big deal, just something to be careful about.) A feature that isn't found many other places is the ability to drop graphics and hyperlinks into your notes. It takes a couple of extra steps to save a graphic; you need to do a "copy" and "paste special" but it still is very handy to be able to do this. (To my knowledge you can't simply copy a full web page, graphics and all, in one operation; you have to do it piecemeal.) Info Select does very good text searching, zooming through all of your stored information in short order, and presenting you with an outline list of everything it found (including the parent categories). So what's wrong with such a powerful program? Not very much, to tell the truth. The calendar is a little awkward, though not overly so. The biggest problem is that establishing links between pieces of information is clumsy and not very effective. Hold on, you say! Why didn't I raise that objection when praising Scraps or my EMACS system? Well, we've started to up the ante somewhat, as we begin to close in on Agenda. And, in fact, Info Select does lag here. While it stores and retrieves as well or probably better than anything else, relationships are not its strong suit. I'll discuss this issue a little later, but for now, suffice it to say that I find Info Select is a great tool in which to "dump" information so that I know I'll be able to find it later. Order something off the Web, and drop the confirmation screen into Info Select. Find an interesting Web page, and squirrel it away. But run my life from its calendar? I don't think so. Run projects and business activities? No. This just isn't the tool for that. 7. Zoot. I've just recently gotten a trial version of Zoot, so I am not very familiar with it as yet. It certainly has its fans; "following" might be a better term. I do think Zoot has the makings of a religion, such as happened with EMACS. Confirmed Zooters who once used Agenda say that this is as close as it comes. I'm hardly familiar enough yet to know if this is true, but there seems to be a lot here. At first I thought Zoot was a slightly weaker version of Info Select. There is the usual outline hierarchy of folders and notes, and there is a "Zooter" which functions much like Info Select's lightning bolt. When you "zoot" some information, though, there is a slightly annoying dialogue to ensure that the information goes to the right place (rather than moving it afterwards). It's about a horse apiece. So far, we're talking Info Select, minus the ability to put graphics into your notes. So should we just forget about Zoot? Definitely not! Zoot has the added ability to organize "projects" around groupings of databases, any number of which can be in use at once. But it doesn't stop there, because Zoot provides "smart folders" which can have very complex actions attached to them. Starting to sound a little like Agenda? A smart folder, for instance, can ship a note off to another folder; change text colors for emphasis; and do a whole host of operations. I would say more, but I've barely scratched the surface. Zoot's calendars are really basic and have no visual appeal. I don't find that to be a problem (and Agenda is no better), because the power behind the smart folders and the rules you can set up all ties in nicely to the calendars. Use a rule that says "tomorrow" or "next week" or "every Wednesday" and Zoot will figure it out and do the right thing. My only objection, as a new user, is that there is no documentation beyond some simple start-up stuff. Sure makes things harder, even though Zoot is pretty intuitive. Before coming to a bottom line, I should learn more about Zoot and work more with it. But I'm not terribly likely to do so, because I've discovered Agenda. 8. Agenda. And finally we're here, at the end of the journey, at least for the moment. Now, I've done this many times in the past. I've found a new tool (CrossTies was a prominent example), latched on to it, spent all sorts of time with it and on it, and then returned to EMACS. Will I do that with Agenda? Only time will tell, but Agenda is the best candidate ever for displacing EMACS. I shall explain in some depth. Agenda is different; the whole paradigm is different. Agenda deals with three forms: items, categories, and views. Many others have tried to describe this, but I see it this way. Items are snippets of information. They can be just about anything, such as "Bob's article on PIMs is confusing" or "call the car place tomorrow morning for a repair appointment" or even "my bank balance is $23 this month." Categories are bins for this information. Categories are set up in a hierarchical outline fashion, which is very appealing, but what is different is that there are many to many, rather than one to one, relationships. An item can be "binned" into any number of categories, and have associated information in those catego- ries. For instance, the repair appointment above may match the categories "car," "repair," and "appointment." It is also (automatically) associated with a "When" category, to which a unique time for the appointment may be assigned. Categories, through the creation of various rules, may also have multiple relationships; for instance, a rule might say to assign anything in the "car" category to the "Ford" category as well. In this case there is a unidirectional relationship between "car" and "Ford." Views are ways of looking at and entering items via their associ- ated categories. In simplest terms, a view is a selection of categories, presented in either a horizonal or "section" format, or a vertical or "column" format. In a business operation, you can view everything to do with, say, a selected group of people, with a column showing a company affiliation and another column showing how much money they owe you. Or you might do something simple such as showing books, authors, and Dewey call numbers. Getting cross-sections of your information with views is a lot more powerful and useful than it sounds. Agenda also provides special handling of dates, including special views based on dates, called datebooks. You can construct an overdue items view by setting up a datebook showing items with a due date of yesterday or older. You can set up a view of appointments for the following week. You can mark items as "done" and have them disappear from certain views or reappear in others. But I've merely scratched the surface so far. Agenda has some very effective artificial intelligence (AI for short). Type in "Tuesday" and the date of the coming Tuesday appears in a item's "when" field. Type in "October 15" and that works too; in fact the AI will round off to the nearest working day if October 15 is on a weekend. Things like "next week" or "every Monday" or "in five months" and many more are correctly interpreted. In fact, Agenda does this so well, I found myself getting annoyed in the few cases that it missed. Nothing like enlightened greed, I suppose. Agenda also examines the text of items that are entered and automatically (and with uncanny accuracy) assigns them to suit- able categories. For instance in my book manager, if I enter a book title "Old BBS Games" the categories "BBS" and "Games" would be pulled out and assigned. Needless to say, there is plenty of user control over this, including a measure of how well text needs to match for an assignment to be made. Shall I go on? Categories can have various rules and actions assigned. For instance, an item can be barred from a certain category unless it belongs to some other categories. Perhaps I don't want to list a car in the Audi category unless it is in the yellow category; a red Audi just won't count. Or, conversely, if an item lands in a certain category, I can spread it to other categories; that Audi can be made to fall into the "toy" category and the "expensive" category at the same time. (I drive an 87 Dodge myself, so these are mere fanciful examples.) And then there is the macro language. While it isn't terribly strong it is reasonably effective and with a little thought it can be made to do quite a few things. (The arithmetic feature appears to be only four-function, which keeps it from being super powerful, although it will handle integer and floating point numbers.) What is really nice, too, is that your categories and category hierarchies are mutable. They don't need to be defined up-front; you can simply start typing in items, and define categories as you see a need. You can add, delete, promote, demote, and otherwise change them around at any time. You can then tell Agenda to go back, rescan all your items, and fix up the category assignments. To each item, you can attach a "note" of up to ten pages or so of text. This note can be either stored within the database or in an external file. Searching of item text, note text, or both, is fast and effective and results in a useful "view" screen of the search results. To my knowledge, though, there is no Boolean search feature. I've probably made Agenda sound powerful and interesting, and indeed, it is. But if you think there is a substantial learning curve here, you are absolutely right. Although Agenda can be obtained for free from a Lotus FTP site, there is no documentation. You'll have to search around on used book sites, or try public library inter-library loans. Fortunately, my company library had an Agenda book, and although it was for an older version, it was still quite helpful. However, it's a bit better than that. Agenda does come with a few sample applications to help you get started, including a planner application that, if not exactly fabulous, is not so bad either. You can use the sample applications and start to figure things out a little. But you really need to do some hard looking for a book or some other documentation. And you also should be prepared to spend many hours experimenting, reading through macro code listings, and dissecting sample applications and databases. Sound intimidating? It's the sort of challenge I thrive upon, although, honestly, this is not for everyone. (At the office, I am accused of being a fan of "geekware." It's a fact. Is Agenda geekware? You decide.) I have a few applications, macros, and information files on my web site at www.bobnewell.net and one thing I do have there is something called President's Planner, which author Alex Todd now gives away, with complete and excellent documentation. You really do want this. It is the planner to end all planners, and you can use it in plug and play fashion by just installing it and studying the documentation. I took a look at it and instantly knew that this was for me. Agenda itself, as a framework, had me mostly convinced, but President's Planner swung the balance. President's Planner adds a completely new level of functionality, and some ease of use, to Agenda. It takes the concept of a personal information manager to a new level. To some extent, it is self-organizing. Add an appointment for next week Monday, and it is brought forward on your calendar, day by day, automatically. President's Planner (PP) provides many useful pre-made categories and views, including the essential "President's Day." PP also invented the Scratch Pad (TM), a brilliant concept in and of itself. There is a scratch pad in each of the various views. Put your cursor on the scratch pad and start typing. Don't worry about anything else, just type, and when you're done, PP puts your new item where it thinks it belongs--- and it is seldom wrong. Using PP as your main database can save you hours of time in putting together a useful planner. You can use it pretty much as-is and then customize much later on when you find truly specific needs. PP's views are well chosen and well implemented. I've already mentioned the Day view. There is a Phone Call view, a Diary view, the usual daily-weekly-monthly views, the Overdue view, and the one I like best: the Obligations view, which indicates who owes you something. There is also an effective delegation meth- od, and a follow-up method. Sounds good? It's great. 9. The Bottom Line. We're at the end. I've run through a number of PIMs and waxed enthusiastic about some of them. So, let's get down to the big question: what am I using today, and why? I have at this point just about completely abandoned my old trusty EMACS system. When I saw what Agenda could do, coupled with President's Planner, I couldn't fight off the temptation to switch. Of course, nothing is simple, and you would not expect me to adopt simple solutions. I am in fact using Info Select along with Agenda, not exactly in parallel, but in a certain sort of conjunction. Let me elaborate. 9.1 My Current Configuration. At home and office, I run several Linux systems, a Windows 98 system, and a couple of good-old-DOS systems. I need (or at least I think I need) interoperability for certain functions. I found that Agenda runs just fine with the Linux DOS emulator, DOSEMU. In conjunction with Linux X-Windows, the X-DOS variant of the emulator runs Agenda so well that you can't tell the difference between emulated and pure DOS operation. Too, in a Windows 98 DOS box, Agenda runs "just like down home." So, putting together a few scripts for automated file transfers and updates, I can run Agenda when, where, and as I wish. This is not true of any of the other options, including my EMACS system. Agenda runs under X-DOS at work; under plain DOSEMU on my Linux server at home; the same way on my old laptop; in a DOS box on my main Windows machine (about which more soon); and under pure DOS on my precious 286 machine (a bit slow, but workable). My main Windows machine is the one I use for most Web browsing at home, because I have to have all the Explorer stuff that many of my favorite interactive sites require. ('Tis a pity.) But there's a saving grace, and that is Info Select. I use Info Select extensively to save bits and pieces, sometimes large pieces, of what I discover in my eclectic Web searchings. Find something interesting--- click the lightning bolt and it's saved, and searchable, forever. I let Info Select transfer personal e- mail from my server; I file away all sorts of things, some of them important. And, with Agenda running in another sub-window, I can move things there when the need arises. I have several Agenda databases. President's Planner is used for my complex work life; the basic Planner is used for my less complicated home schedule (not less busy, just less "programmed" so to speak). I use a new "scraps" database, which I devised for Agenda, to store odds and ends as I have for years. That one is shared by home and office. I have several other databases, such as books, bills due, etc., which are for home use. I think you get the picture. So, at work, while running President's Planner and having Agenda "Scraps" available, I can do a quick telnet to my home server and check on what's on for the weekend. (Agenda, over telnet, via DOS emulation--- it's a marvel, and it works very nicely. Try that with any other PIM!) 9.2 Determining Factors. I'd now like to summarize some of this rambling discussion by listing a few of the factors that led me to this somewhat complex but rather effective PIM configuration. Let's take a quick look. 9.2.1 Interoperability. This is an absolute requirement, and I've now achieved it to an extent never before realized. I can run Agenda in some manner on every machine I have, both at work and office (and that's 11 machines of all sorts and types). Plain DOS, DOS boxes, DOS emulation: it all works and works correctly. The scripting needed to keep 11 machines in synch with respect to databases took a little thought, but it can (and obviously has) been done. 9.2.2 Utility. Multiple Agenda databases for multiple purposes are one simple facet of utility. That these databases can be easily copied or generated from scratch without hours of LISP programming is a major advantage (no matter how much I enjoy fundamental hacking, time is always short). Agenda existing alongside Info Select, as a complimentary pair, is also a valuable feature. Although I only run Info Select on one machine, nevertheless this expands my total horizon of possi- bility. It isn't hard, for instance, to save an appointment under Agenda Planner and simply note that travel maps, hotel pictures, etc., are stored in Info Select.... and to leave myself a timely reminder to print them out before getting in the car. I am sold on the many features of Agenda and President's Planner for use in the workplace. I can track commitments, keep up with my calendar, and in general be sure that little to nothing falls in the cracks, which, I've found over time, is one of the great- est danger to progress and success in the office world. And, I'm finding new and productive uses for Agenda all the time, both at home and at work. Agenda reminds me to pay the credit card bill or the county tax (due all too soon). 9.2.3 Power and Scope. Even given the hefty learning requirements, I haven't found anything that does as much as Agenda, nor does it as well. Zooters may disagree, but Zoot would not give me the interopera- bility that I now have. Every time I think: I wish Agenda did... or, I wish Agenda could... I find that it's either already there or (at least within the bounds of a text-based program) somehow doable. (And I am convinced that, with enough thought and the use of auxiliary tools such as WinBatch or the like, I'll someday be able to store effective pointers to graphics and web-links which can activate with Agenda macros. Hmm, come to think of it, it may not be all that hard....) 10. The End. I'm a couple of weeks into the change at this writing, and so far I'm very pleased. Will it hold up, or, as I have done several times before, will I go meekly back to EMACS? There are no certainties, but there is one sure sign. Agenda is one of the rare applications which makes me say, "I wish I had been smart enough to create that one myself, but it's way beyond my skills." E-mail me in a few months and I'll give an update! Bob Newell Santa Fe, New Mexico October, 2002 pimster@bobnewell.net Minor updates and corrections: 22 August 2011 Bob Newell Honolulu, Hawai`i.