Sometimes we forget to write about programs we've known about forever. Here they are now.
Our friend Olga is using a notebook to keep track of her day trading. Now she's more organized than we are. Which isn't hard to do. But there are programs that make organization easier.
Our favorite is Evernote, a free app for your computer, phone, or tablet. It's been around for 20 years, but gets easier and easier to use. It gives you as many notebooks as you have ideas. They're displayed in a master index.
Joy has an Evernote notebook called "Favorite Recipes." Though she could use Microsoft Word, Evernote makes it easy to flip through her whole collection as though it were a magazine, even if some items are Word documents, others are PDFs, and some is just stuff copied from websites.
We also like Evernote's tags. Joy added the tag "mint" to her favorite smoothie recipe. If later she clicks the "mint" tag, she can see all the recipes with that ingredient. You can also add photos, voice notes and more.
Every time you make an entry, you have the option to share either it or the whole notebook. If you want to view notebooks others have shared with you, click the "shared with me" label. This might be a fun way to give someone a digital cookbook.
For other ideas, see "38 Things You Should Save in Evernote." For each item, there's a template you can download. The meeting template, for example, has sections, such as who signed up for what. Evernote can record the meeting if you click the microphone icon in the formatting bar.
Microsoft's OneNote is another free app. When it first came out, it cost around $100. You can download it for free at onenote.com/download. Despite the introductory videos, however, Joy hated it.
STICKY NOTES
Sticky Notes are the digital equivalent of 3M's Post-it notes. They even look the same. It's built into Windows. To find it, type "sticky" into the search bar on the lower left of your screen. Create as many as you want by clicking the plus sign on a note. The Mac has something similar called "Stickies."
When a note pops up, you can type whatever you want into it and it stays there on your screen. If you don't like it taking up screen space, and we don't, you can push it to the edge of the screen so that only a little piece of yellow shows. Whatever you put on the sticky note can be copied and moved to a regular document. If you click the three dots, you can change it from yellow to some other color.
SMART BUT EXPENSIVE
SmartDraw costs $10 a month. It was initially intended for creating organizational charts. But it can also do floor layouts, or calculate the length of a ramp to reach a certain height for handicap access, among a hundred other uses. It comes with more than 4,500 templates and 34,000 symbols.
What caught Bob's attention to use as a note-taking program is its empty boxes. You can call up a flow chart or what they call a "mind map" and each of these boxes can hold an unlimited amount of text, pictures and symbols. If you were writing a book, each box could be a chapter.
SCAMS
Email scams are getting cleverer. Bob was nearly fooled by one that claimed to be from Fidelity, a brokerage. Everything about it seemed real. But he is rightly suspicious of any "urgent request" or "verification requirement."
Joy has come close to clicking on a bad link too. What we've both learned is to check the sender's email address. Scammers never have it quite right. For instance, instead of ATT.com, they might use ATTbusiness.com. If in doubt, make a phone call and ask. In general, banks and brokerage firms never ask for verification by email.
YOUR SIGNATURE GOES HERE
Ever want to sign an email with your actual signature, instead of a typed version of it? It's easy, but takes a bit of tweaking.
First, write your name on a piece of paper. Take a picture of it with your phone or digital camera. Email it to yourself. When Joy did it, however, her signature had a gray box around it. To get rid of that, she installed the free Photoshop Express. After opening the file in that program, she clicked on the three lines on the left, which stand for "Exposure." She chose "Whites" and slid the slider all the way to the right. Presto! The box was gone. There was only one problem: The signature was too big. So she opened the file in Paint, a free program that comes with your Windows computer. She clicked "resize" and chose "85" for the top number under "pixels." Paint automatically chose the bottom number. It came out perfectly. If you're on a Mac, Paintbrush is similar.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at [email protected] and [email protected].