< ehewlett HOME <

Your Outlook appointments on Desktop

Do you use Outlook for your scheduling? (That's Outlook, not Outlook Express, its cut-down, e-mail only cousin.) I just found this really useful little shareware program, NVN (for Nicht Vergessen), that displays your Outlook appointments and tasks in a neat month-view (or week-view or 5-day view) calendar on your desktop. Very helpful for collecting all your important scheduling info and displaying it on the single most-viewed portion of your computer - your desktop. So far I've found only two (very minor) flaws: the program was originally written in German, so it contains the occasional bits of awkward English (like "no further Infos"), and updating the calendar after new appointments have been entered is rather slow and has to be initiated manually.
A flashier (but, in my opinion, less useful) shareware program that does much the same thing is DeskLook. DeskLook looks cooler than NVN, but can't show a whole month's-worth of appointments at once or display multiple calendars and - the deciding factor for me - kept crashing on my old Win98SE system (though they claim it was perfectly stable on their own Win98 test-system).
Finally, if all you're concerned about is price and/or function, not looks, there's a free solution using Microsoft's Digital Dashboard. Takes a bit of technical know-how to get up and running, but once it's running it does the job admirably.

Labels: