Visual Day Planner 7.1 What's new in 7.1? Douglas Smith
What's New In 7.1
Visual Day Planner has gone through a lot of phases in its releases starting back to version 4.3 which we did a review of about a year or so ago. We have seen many changes in the way the program works and how you use it. Visual Day Planner 7.1 has had some major face lifting along with some other useful and maybe not so useful enhancements. We will try to discuss the new features and let you know how they work. First on the list of enhancements is the interface which has been changed to give greater ease of use, controls are more simplified allowing for easier interpretation of what various icons mean. There has been an Advance Recurring Event Function added, which allows you to set an event to recur on specific days, weeks, or months which can be planned out indefinitely. Also enhancements to the Network Alarm have been added, allowing multiple users to set alarms allowing each other the ability to be reminded of important task in real-time. Data is now automatically locked and unlocked via a new automatic locking mechanism, while the new Tray Icon handles the program startup with just a single click instead of multiple mouse clicks. Undo and Redo is now supported and there is support for Public Holidays in twenty countries. In previous versions of Visual Day Planner you had to contend with the icons for the program being loaded all the time, but not anymore, you can now load and unload them as you need them saving you plenty of resources. Date Difference is now customizable with your choice of colors and fonts.
Now, InkLine Global, Inc. didn't stop there with just new features to the program, they also gave you some nice tools to go along with the program like a snooze feature, color calendar printing, network automated feature, database management, and quite a few bug fixes thrown in.
What's Nice and What's Not?
While we liked what we saw in the new version of Visual Day Planner 7.1, we were really impressed with the speed at which it now loads. In past versions that we have seen loading speed was slow and sluggish and once the interface was up the program just didn't seem quite as compact as we would like to have seen it. The visual appeal is much better now with smoother lines and menu choices being more informative and organized now than in past versions. It is now much easier to schedule events and alarms both on a stand alone and network and it now seems to work first time every time with recurrences as well. One area that we did notice that is still a glitch in the armor of Visual Day Planner 7.1 and has been a problem in just about every version that we have tried, and that is the fonts on the calendar, which don't exactly reproduce correctly. We noticed that some of the fonts had the bottoms cut off on our text as started putting in appointments. This could have been due to another part of our computer's setup, but we think it's just a minor glitch in the program.
How Does It Stack Up?
We searched around the Net for comparable programs to measure Visual Day Planner 7.1, with very little luck in terms of finding programs that can do all of the things that this program can do. Microsoft's PIM built into OutLook is similar in terms of scheduling and some alarms that can be set, but just isn't in the same league as Visual Day Planner, especially when you take into consideration the many features that come with it. Programs like Calendar creator plus will make very nice looking calendars that you can post information and schedules to, but when it comes to constant updates, alarms that can be set concurrently, along with the fonts, icons, colors, styles, and speed Visual Day Planner is in a league of its own.
