.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Manage your car’s mileage with AutoFile
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY With gas prices through the roof, and no relief in sight, many people are trying to drive less, or at least be more efficient about how they use their vehicles. But how do you know if your changes are having any effect? WakefieldSoft’s AutoFile lets you see exactly how you’re doing. Is it worth your money? Heather Wardell’s review will clue you in.
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With gas prices through the roof, and no relief in sight, many people are trying to drive less, or at least be more efficient about how they use their vehicles. But how do you know if your changes are having any effect? WakefieldSoft’s AutoFile lets you see exactly how you’re doing.
The software is available for Palm, PC, and Windows Mobile users. For this review, I tested both the Palm and PC versions, and synchronized information between them.
The quick start guide on the Web site suggests adding a vehicle first and then setting the application’s preference. As a Canadian, I need my mileage recorded in kilometers, and when I followed the guide’s directions, my starting kilometers were converted into miles. I suggest setting the preferences first, even if you are using miles and gallons, just to make sure everything is as you want it.
Once the preferences are set up, it’s time to add a vehicle. In Figure A, I am adding my car’s information. I found all of the screens in this application to be easy to use and understand, although navigating the menus using my Treo’s central navigation pad does not work. Stylus taps do work correctly.
.FIGPAIR A All of my car’s information is stored in AutoFile, and, yes, my Tiburon is named Tibby.
.TEASER Tap here to read Heather’s full review.
The application is divided into four main sections: Fuel, Service, Trips, and Memo. The section you’ll use most often is Fuel, to enter a gas purchase. Figure B shows the data entry screen in both the PC and Palm versions. The only mandatory fields are odometer and quantity purchased, but the rest can be useful information, depending on how much you want and need to track.
.FIGPAIR B The PC and Palm data entry screens store your gas purchases and calculate your mileage and fuel economy.
Once the odometer’s new reading is entered, the software calculates the mileage since the last gas purchase. Fuel economy is determined once you’ve also entered the amount of gas purchased.
The application did not generate a fuel economy score for me on my first fill up. I had taken the car’s odometer reading at the time of the fill up, subtracted how far the trip odometer had said I’d gone since the previous fill up, and used that number for my starting kilometers, so it should have been able to calculate this for me. When I manually entered the trip length, the calculation was done correctly, and it did work properly for subsequent fill ups, but since the odometer reading at the fill up was higher than my starting reading I think it should have been able to determine my economy.
The Service section’s data entry works the same as the Fuel section, with the exception that you can set reminders on each type of service. The software comes with a service list containing everything I could imagine my car needing, and more, but if you need to add a particular service it’s easy to do so. You can set the reminder to be at a certain odometer reading, or a certain date, and the preferences let you set how far in advance the reminder will be triggered.
Trips isn’t something I found useful for myself, but if you are able to be reimbursed for mileage through work (or for tax reporting), I can see it being invaluable. You can enter the start time (strangely, not the finish time as well) of a trip, its start and end odometer reading, and additional information about where you went and why. The PC version can print reports of this information, which would make it far easier to fill out an expense report.
Memos comes pre-populated with three memos: insurance company information, auto club membership information, and a template of information you’d need to collect in the event of a collision. I tend to keep all of my memos organized in the Palm’s Memo Pad application, but I can see the benefit of keeping auto-related ones here, and the collision template would be a great way to organize your thoughts at a difficult time.
Synchronization worked well. Changing information on one platform and deleting a record on the other, then synchronizing, resulted in the record being recreated on both platforms. Changing the same record on both platforms resulted in two copies of the record. In both cases, the software didn’t alert me that this had been done; I generally prefer to be informed that I have made such changes as they are often inadvertent. However, AutoFile’s method of handling discrepancies does ensure that no data is lost.
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From the PC version, you can print reports and graphs. However, I found the graphs to have some labeling issues. Figure C shows my car’s fuel cost since April, with each month’s column labeled as Jan 2008. The fuel cost, service cost, and distance graphs all have the same problem. (The fuel economy line graph works properly.) The reports are labeled correctly, but some of the headings wrap from one line to the next mid-word, which does not look professional.
.FIGPAIR C It all works, as long as you just drive in January, according to AutoFile’s graph, and its labeling error.
Overall, AutoFile is a decent piece of software. While the amount of detail it collects may be overkill for the average driver, its flexibility allows you to track only what you really want to know. If you have multiple vehicles, or are running a fleet or billing for mileage, AutoFile is indispensable.
The menu display error in the Palm version and the graph and report oddities are unfortunate, but in most cases they won’t hinder your use of the software.
AutoFile Plus’s rating is a 3.
.RATING 3
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.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn more about [[http://www.wakefieldsoft.com/autofile/|AutoFile Plus]].
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