Desk Diary claims it is a powerful Diary Information Management System. In essence, you can make diary entries by date, you can maintain separate pages of notes such as names and addresses, and you can search the information base for the occurrence of any string. In addition, you can import or export files between Desk Diary and Easy File, Easy Script and Easy Calc.

It sounds good, but naturally there are restrictions and your attitude to this piece of software will depend on how dedicated you are to micros. In other words I still think a traditional handwritten diary is superior.

Your diary is maintained on a separate data disc. The year is divided into pre-determined quarters, i.e. Quarter 1 is always 1st January to 31st March, and you set up your data disc for the current quarter. Desk Diary allows you to make entries on up to 30 future appointments beyond the current quarter. These are carried forward automatically when the next quarter's disc is set up. When you make an entry against a date you must remember to save it to disc before returning to the main menu.

While the main menu is displayed, there is a window situated at the top right hand corner of the screen that displays the appointment entries over 10 days starting from the previous Sunday. You can scroll this window as required. In the bottom corner of the screen there is a real time clock which you set when starting up Desk Diary.

One of the options from the main menu is Desk Data. This in effect passes you to 19 other general purpose pages which can contain information. As supplied, Desk Diary has these pages already set up, partly for your convenience and partly to illustrate how they can be used. Thus one page is set up for conversion factors, another for hotel details, another for your tax details etc.

Any information held in Desk Diary can be searched by the Easy Analysis option. You enter the text you are searching for and a start date, or you can search for a specified date and retrieve its appointments page. There is an option to print out anything retrieved to a Commodore printer (the system hung outputting to my Epson).

Despite a few other features I found it limiting and slow, so my existing diary remains a valued possession.

This needs a disc drive.

L.C.