Ecco Programs Reverberate With Pluses

Managing personal information with a computer seems to be a formidable task. At least, no standard way of going about it has developed, unlike word processing and spreadsheet software, for which there are more features in common than there are differences among the leading programs.

The key to the problem is the word personal , which is the tip-off that the information one person has to manage may be quite different from that of others.

There are a couple of needs most people have in common, however: schedules and telephone numbers. Thus, Ecco Simplicity ($79) and Ecco Professional ($395) from Arabesque Software Inc. of Bellevue, Wash. ((800) 457-4243) incorporate an excellent calendar for keeping track of appointments and a flexible phone book for keeping track of people.

But where many other programs don’t offer much beyond a calendar and a phone book, those elements are only the beginning for Ecco. What really gives these personal information management programs their unique power are other features bearing the commonplace names “outline,” “column” and, in Ecco Professional, “folder.”

Ecco is a Windows program, running on IBM-compatible computers. It integrates well with other Windows programs, incorporating easy methods of exchanging information or linking directly to data in those programs.

In a single Ecco file you can store all the key information you need to do your job. You can keep track of all the people you deal with, including notes on every telephone conversation you have with them. You can maintain a schedule of all your appointments and commitments, including as many notes about each as you wish. Recurring events are easy to schedule, even for complicated cycle sequences.

You can keep track of every project or task you have to undertake and even create Gantt project management charts with Ecco Professional showing starting and completion dates for everything that must be accomplished. And you can instantly see which jobs you’ve assigned to each subordinate and how they are progressing.

The program will also help you write a report on your activities to your superiors.

Because Ecco is a Windows program, you can simultaneously have on your screen several different windows into the program, or “views” as Ecco calls them.

I found it useful in one view to split the screen vertically into two halves, displaying the telephone book, complete with alphabetical tabs, on the left side of my screen. The other side was the calendar, in which I could switch from seeing a single day, week or a month at a time with the click of a mouse button.

As a day progressed, I could quickly look up phone numbers, add names to my list, make appointments and respond to program alarms I set to make sure I got to meetings on time.

In between phone calls and meetings, I had another window superimposed over the first. It contained an outline of whatever project I needed to work on at the moment. In fact, I could have several outline views open at the same time and easily move among them as necessary.

An Ecco outline is simple to create and modify. Lines (or paragraphs) are not merely text. Each item is really a unit in an elaborate hierarchical database. When you indent an entry to the right or move it out to the left, you are actually changing its relationship to the other entries in that outline.

You can enhance outlines by adding what amount to spreadsheet-style columns to contain special data such as dates or amounts or a priority rating.

In Ecco Professional, each column (up to 50 of them) can be given a descriptive label and special formatting.

Outline items can be sorted by any column. For instance, you could establish a priority column for tasks and sort the outline so that each item was ranked according to its priority.

The final power feature of Ecco Professional is folders. You can create person folders or topic folders or project folders and use the mouse to drag into them copies of any item from an outline or a phone book or your calendar. The result is a great cross-referencing system that lets you simultaneously organize data in numerous ways.

To help you get started, Ecco comes with templates to use the program in a law office, for general-purpose management, project management, research and sales.

As I was learning the program, I used it to create an outline of its features and shortcomings. When I was finished, I used Ecco’s “shooter” function to instantly send a copy of the outline’s text into a word processing file, where I actually wrote the column.

I found only a few shortcomings. For instance, there is a feature in the phone book that allows you to log the date, time and duration of calls, in five-minute increments. But there are no instructions in the manual about how to print the call log client by client. (It’s easy after technical support tells you the way to reformat the data displayed in that column.)

The pages that Ecco does print, such as calendar pages to fit popular notebooks from Franklin, Day Timer, Day Runner and LeFax, are beautifully formatted, complete with various font styles and sizes, drop shadow borders and shading.

But, at least on my venerable Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II, it takes a long time for those fancy graphics images to print.