By Heather Wardell
I've been using an older list management program for years, so when I started working on this review of the ListPro list and information manager, I expected to give it a quick trial and go back to my old way of tracking tasks and other list-type information. Instead, I've found a new way.
Installation and first use
The installation of the Windows PC and Palm versions of the software went smoothly. At the end of the Windows install, the program opened a "Getting Started" guide, which contained a lot of useful information, clearly presented, about how to use ListPro. The guide actually contained more information than I realized; there are text links to "Previous" and "Next" on some of the screens, but I didn't notice them at first.
After looking over the demo lists, I decided to create a new list. Being used to a program that stores each list in its own file, I attempted to create a new file. ListPro displayed the screen shown in Figure A, one of the clearest error/information screens I've ever seen in a software program, to let me know that I was already synchronizing with a specific file. When I cancelled the wizard, it popped up again unexpectedly, but it did go away after the second cancel.
FIGURE A
ListPro's screens are clearly written and informative. (click for larger image)
To create a new list, you can click the "Quick List" button to create a basic checklist, or use one of the existing templates. You can also download an existing list from the Ilium Software Web site, most of which are reference guides or lists of television show episodes.
Creating your own list is the most flexible, as you can choose what kinds of fields to include and in what order, but the templates can be modified as well. Strangely, when I asked the software to create a list from its templates, it reported that it couldn't locate the template file. As I allowed it to install in its default folder, I can't see why it was unable to locate the file. There is a menu item (which the software did tell me about) to choose the template file. I located it, in the default install folder, and had no further difficulties.
My 'trip preparation' lists
My review of ListPro came at a good time for me, as I'm preparing for a conference across the country in a few days. ListPro worked exactly as I'd expected, and I had my list of things to do put together in short order. Figure B shows the list on my desktop on the left and on my Treo on the right. The column sizes are adjustable, and I've moved mine to hide part of the date to give me more room to see the task names.
