FORM FOBIA

Dick Pountain/27 December 1997/Idealog 41

A couple of columns ago I printed a list of very simple things I ought to be able to do with my PC but can't. I left out perhaps the most important one, on the grounds that I was hoping to fix it soon and didn't want to jinx my chances. That simple thing is just this: I want to keep all my contact names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses in a single place. That sounds like something that ought to be possible, and perhaps it is if you use only Microsoft products, though frankly I doubt it even then.

Why make fuss about keeping just one address database? Well, it's a matter of principle for me as much as one of practicality. I have these three Utopian principles concerning the way computers ought to work, and if I don't try to at least pay lip-service to them, I risk sinking into insanity. The principles are these:

I) You should never have to type in the same information twice. If the info is already in computer, then the software damn well better let you reuse it - for example once you've given a filename to a new file, you want to select that file by picking from a list, rather having to type in its full name again. Amazingly there are still a few programs that make you do that, though most programmers have now discovered the joys of the Win95 Common File Dialog and its Browse button.

II) You should never store the same information in more than one place. That's just a matter of coherence - if you keep multiple copies, how can you be sure you've updated them all when the information changes?

III) Er, actually you should always store the same information in at least two places. That's called Backup.

Principle II requires me to keep all my contact information in one program if I can. The reasons I can't are several and diverse. First off there's the lack of any simple universal inter-application communication. In the course of my work I use two online services, Cix and Bix, both of which have dedicated offline reader programs - Ameol and Galahad - that contain their own proprietory email address books. The only way they could access email addresses from my central address database is via the clipboard, and that's impossibly awkward if I need to mail several recipients at once: hence I store email addresses inside both of them. I don't like the Windows Fax program, preferring Cheyenne BitFax, which of course has its own address-book of fax numbers. Then I use the Microsoft Internet Mail and News client, which keeps yet another address book.

None of the applications I use (Ameol, Galahad, BitFax, Idealist) are OLE-enabled, which cuts out the possibility of writing VB scripts to automate the whole process from a single address database. I've tried to make myself love the Microsoft components that would in theory let me create an OLE solution, but I can't do it. Outlook has possibly the worst user interface I've ever encountered, but even if I could get beyond that there's the additional complication that I can't stand form-based address books. The program I actually keep my main contacts database in is Idealist, a free-text database, and before that I used several other free-text information managers like AskSam and FolioViews - it's maybe ten years since I used a forms-based product. The large companies that I deal with have many different contact persons with different phone numbers, and I find handling these in a rigidly forms-based database very inconvenient indeed.

For example, I currently have around 12 different phone numbers and contact persons listed for IBM, the exact number varying from year to year. Using a conventional flat file database I'd have to either design a form with more than twelve fields called Phone1, Phone2... (most of which would remain empty in most records), or else create an individual record for each contact person, which makes browsing them a real chore when you can't remember who you need to speak to. The proper way to do it might be a full SQL database and a join between separate Company and Person tables, but frankly that's overkill to me when Idealist lets me keep just a single IBM record and append as many or few numbers as I need, complete with free-text labels :-

IBM
099-42626
0171-202-374 Kate Stretton Press Office
Portsmouth
0175-31212
0175-51780 Alison Pilcher PR
0175-51749 Val Russell
Basingstoke
0126-5144
0126-33507 Kevin Perlmutter  PowerPC
0126-34390 Val Russell
0126-34429 Rohan Fernando - AIX

Updating this is dead easy and I can autodial any of those numbers just by right clicking on it. I've tried almost every PIM on market - Lotus Organiser, Sidekick, Outlook, you name it - and all of them fall down in this area. Some offer a list of different phone types like Business, Home, Mobile, and several phone fields, but never anywhere near enough. I've tried to force myself to to live with the address book in PalmPilot Desktop, but with no luck. Desktop 1.0 fell at the first hurdle because it didn't have autodial, so I recently upgraded my Pilot 5000 to Professional status to use Desktop 2.0, which does have autodial - the trouble is that if you have multiple phone numbers in a record, autodial will only work on the first one in the list. So I still keep my master address book in Idealist and export it periodically into PalmPilot Desktop. This year I intend to try out Ecco and ACT! to see if either of those will do what I want, but I'm not holding my breath.