11/16/98 SECRETARIES FOR THE REST OF US

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SECRETARIES FOR THE REST OF US

It is precisely because I don't have a secretary that I have come to rely on a PIM. Short for ''personal-information manager,'' these nimble programs, such as the Day-Timer Organizer software that I use, help shepherd me through the day. With a simple mouse click, I can display my daily, weekly, or monthly calendars, and view a prioritized To Do list. I can also access phone numbers and E-mail addresses. When I schedule appointments, the program warns me of conflicts and identifies open time slots. Lest I forget a key birthday or anniversary, my PIM reminds me of both.
Pimming, as I call it, hasn't changed much over the years. But the latest programs promise to take full advantage of the Internet and make it simpler for nomadic executives to swap and synchronize data among their desktop PCs, laptops, and handheld gizmos.
NO ROCKET SCIENCE. Each of the four popular PIMs I tested--Day-Timer Organizer 2000, Lotus Organizer 5.0, Microsoft Outlook 98, and Starfish Software's Sidekick 99--handles rudimentary PIM functions just fine but has shortcomings in other areas.
Nowhere are those shortcomings more obvious than in Starfish's Sidekick 99. With only a few icons, I found it the simplest PIM to master (though none demand that you be a rocket scientist). Sidekick is a less ambitious PIM than its competitors. The new version eats up just half the hard-disk space of its predecessor, but it has also deep-sixed such features as expense reporting--which I like in Day-Timer--and the ability to create HTML Web pages from its calendar.
While Sidekick has dieted, Microsoft Outlook 98 has bulked up. At heart, it's a muscular E-mail program that lets you easily trash junk mail and preview missives without opening them as a separate window. But I would also give Outlook a passing grade as a PIM--it's just more cumbersome than other programs for adding contacts and appointments.
The new Outlook, along with both Lotus Organizer and Day-Timer Organizer, also promises to exploit emerging Net standards for sharing contact and calendar information via the Web. The idea is that instead of having to retype--or cut and paste--address and scheduling details from an E-mail into your PIM, you can drag so-called VCard or VCal icons from sites on the Web into the program, and the data will be automatically filled in. It still isn't that easy, however.
FAMILIAR LOOK. As for core PIM functions, both Lotus Organizer and Day-Timer Organizer resemble electronic versions of that old standby, the paper appointment book, and behave in much the same way. The Lotus screen is my favorite. Users can click on tabs (To Do, Anniversary) to bring up pages. Lotus has bolstered the contact-management area, allowing you to store 20 phone numbers and a half-dozen addresses for each contact.
The company says it's also a snap to convert data from other PIMs. Not quite. I never could successfully get Lotus to decipher my Day-Timer databases, even though that was one of the programs it claimed it could mesh with. (It wasn't clear whether the snag lay in my Day-Timer data or with the Lotus program.)
As for Day-Timer 2000, the program is still versatile and a cinch to use, and none of the other programs provided a compelling reason to switch. Most of Day-Timer's improvements are modest, however. There's a new spell-checker, and you can access phone numbers or your schedule for a given day without fully launching the program. Uh-oh, there goes my PIM alarm--gotta dash.
By Edward C. Baig in New York

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