The Top Three Free Personal Information Managers

The Top Three Free Personal Information Managers

Computers make it easy to accumulate and store lots of information. Research notes. Images. Interesting and informative articles. E-mails you want to save for one reason or another.

You can try to use Windows Explorer to organize all of this data, but it doesn’t always work out. And, when you have hundreds (even thousands) of pieces of information stored in your My Documents folder, and they aren’t well-organized, finding exactly what you need when you need it can be difficult, if not impossible.

Personal Information Managers (or PIMs) might be the solution you’re looking for. These little personal databases can organize all of your files in a way that makes them easy to find fast. Most also allow you to encrypt and password protect your documents, making it harder for others to gain access to your sensitive information.

Over the years, I’ve tried just about every PIM you can imagine. And I’ve found that, out of all the free PIMs out there, these are the top three.

TreeDBNotes.

TreeDBNotes uses a hierarchical tree-structure, similar to that used by Windows Explorer, to organize the notes in the database.

The editor is similar to WordPad, which allows you to use many of the same formatting functions. You can also insert tables, images, links, and files into each note.

When I’m trying a new PIM, some of the first thingss I look at are its import and export functions. TreeDBNotes allows you to import and export many different file formats: plain text, rtf documents, Microsoft Word and Excel documents, and so on.

There are no size limits, so notes can be as big as you want them to be. There’s also no limit on the amount of notes you can have in a database. And you can create several databases, or “notebooks,” each for a different subject or category.

TreeDBNotes allows you to backup your databases after each use. You can also repair damaged or corrupted databases. And, by compacting databases, you not only make their file size smaller, you can make them perform better and run faster.