Windows 7: Non Internet Contacts Program,

At the moment, my contact list is stored in GMail. Every once and a while, we drop our connection. Can't call the Cable company and ask what's going on since the number is on the internet.

I'd rather keep all of this info on my computer password protected. I'd also like a large notes field so I can track data.



Any suggestions?

Burt

What a dope! I just discovered the included Contacts program.

Through WinXP I'd been using the old Corel WordPerfect 7 Address Book software (although I didn't use Corel WordPerfect any longer). I'd invested many years in the data contained in this Address Book, and although it wasn't all that "powerful" or modern, I had many hundreds of entries and a number of sub-books.

When I upgraded to Windows 7 and discovered WordPerfect 7 would not install or behave properly (even I tried to just manually run the previously installed Address Book component), I was forced to look for another Windows 7-compatible product. I also needed a way to migrate from Corel's Address Book to any new product's database, and hoped that my manual effort in this migration would be minimal although I was prepared to invest whatever time it took.

After exploring a number of products, I ultimately settled on StatTrak's Address Manager Business Edition v4.2 (not free, but $50 is reasonable) to meet my needs and provide all kinds of new functionality I'd never had before.

I was luckily able to export my Corel Address Book software into a CSV file format, though it wasn't perfect. I did a bunch of manual editing on it before eventually importing it into StatTrak's Address Manager. However because of the 1-dimension "flat" nature of the exported CSV data, it also reflected this 1-dimension "flat" characteristic when imported into the StatTrak product... rather than the "sub-book" 2-dimensional implementation I'd developed with the Corel product.

So I invested another week or so, manually reconstructing what I'd imported into the StatTrak product to organize things using the new enhanced capabilities and user-interface. The raw data was there from the import, but it needed to be re-located and re-organized in order to maximize usability per my needs.

After more than a year of using this new product (following a decade using the Corel Address Book, so it was really some separation anxiety for a while) I'm very satisfied with the results. I do feel the GUI of the StatTrak product could use some improvement and have written them about it (to no avail yet, though they did respond politely).

However as far as being a "contacts" or "Address Book" product I feel this one is excellent. I opted for the "business edition" because there were features in that version which I absolutely had to have and which were not in the "personal edition".


Now that you've mentioned the Windows 7 Contacts feature I've just done a little exploring. Interesting. And free.

But I prefer the 2-level organizational address book/sub-book -> individuals presentation of the StatTrak product. Very intuitive and easy-to-understand and use.

I've had to do this migration so many times of the years. I still have somewhat important data in my Palm Pilot V that I can't get into anything (tho I haven't tried again since going to Windows 7).

In essence, the most critical aspect of any contacts/address program is its ability to import and export in a commonly used format. The Windows 7 contacts program uses CSV, LDIF and vCard. Perhaps, I can go around to all of the ancient address files in the various formats I've collected over the years and import them into one common DB.

However, I'm fairly happy with the default Contacts and will write a script to export the data once a week for archival purposes.

As long as you know what/where the "documents" or other proprietary format files the contacts database is in, and as long as it's backed up with everything else in your periodic backups (once a week is certainly reasonable for anybody concerned with disaster recovery and not losing their crucial priceless data in the event of a machine failure or accidental file deletion), no extra special steps really need to be invented.

I use Beyond Compare to "sync" the five files representing the database for the StatTrak product between my two home machines, so that I can do address book updates on either machine to the locally installed database on either machine (for that added flexibility) and just bring the other "copy" up to date. I prefer that approach to "networking" a single copy of the database hosted by one machine, accessing it directly from the other machine. In one sense, this is already a built-in backup of the database... even without running the periodic system backups I run for each machine.

Also, before leaving Corel's Address Book I had used used simple file-copies of the "database" (written to CD) to install my Address Book software and data on family machines (at their homes), so that I could have access to it from any of the family machines if needed when I might be visiting. I now do the same thing with the StatTrak product's five database files.

No question about it... the easy portability of the "database" for any such product, for transporting or disaster/recovery or new machine installation, is absolutely a requirement.