Filed 17 August, 1995 for publication August 25, 1995
799 Words
By Jason Romney
The road warrior must often fill the role of crisis manager, called on to perform amazingly difficult feats with little notice and less preparation. The warrior's mettle is best shown on that chilly 6am flight when a colleague billed as 10am keynote speaker at a distant conference has fallen sick or a key overseas negotiator for the warrior's side has been snowed in at some remote airport.
The bottom line is that a lot of information must be examined, sorted and put into useful form (complete with trump cards and appropriate jokes) by the end of the flight. You foolishly agreed to accept the brief - and now you are staring at your computer screen, wedged between your nose and the (much reclined) airline seat in front.
No matter how awful the jet lag (or hangover), a road warrior can have an enviable secret weapon at this moment of truth. It's called InfoSelect and costs just $199 (tel: 03 9427 0168).
This free-form text retrieval program allows anyone with a notebook computer to recall instantly, with a few deft keystrokes, any scrap of information which crossed your path previously, irrespective of its obscurity or vintage.
There's no need to wrestle with data fields. The warrior simply bashes out notes about phone calls, letters, thoughts, ideas, dates, addresses, phone numbers, passwords (or whatever) into `windows' which automatically expand up to 30,000 characters to accommodate the size of the note. (If you MUST have a consistent data input format, an InfoSelect window can be organised into a `form' which structures the information like a traditional database.)
A window can be automatically time and date stamped, contain text of various colors or absorb an independent ASCII file. The most important feature is that once data is entered, your `stack' of windows can be interrogated with a range of powerful search strategies.
An exact search on a particular text string is the same as when you look for a word or phrase within a file with your word processor. You might want any window from your stack of jokes which mentions lawyers. There's nothing particularly special about that - and indeed, you can perform all the usual `and'/`or' searches.
The real power of InfoSelect first peeks out with a `return' search - eg if I kept a list of all the most profitable Disney movie deals, I might want to return to the general stack any notes of deals I know Disney chief Michael Eisner played a big part in when I'm chatting with the Eisner estranged former Disney magnate (now at Dreamworks/SKG), Michael Katzenberg.
An even more powerful strategy is the `neural' search in which a warrior enters a list of various words and InfoSelect returns the windows that contain as many of the words as possible, irrespective of where the words may appear in the text in a given window. A multimedia developer might search a stack for any jottings which contained as many as possible of the words: `CD-ROM', `contract' and `developer'.
InfoSelect is a wonderfully useful program for a road warrior with numerous other powerful features such as an ability to create `overviews' of information contained in a certain paragraph of multiple windows. It has mailmerge and its date `ticklers' make it a reasonably effective appointment diary as well.
But no matter how well InfoSelect will manipulate information AFTER you actually get it in your computer, there will often be times when the warrior's brief reconnaissance stopover is made in suboptimal circumstances. A lawyer involved in less than friendly litigation might visit an opponent's office and be told certain documents can be inspected only in a room without a copier. A journalist might have a brief opportunity to check some magazine references in a library before an interview, only to find all the copiers are out of order.
At this point you need a Primax Datapen (call 0011 1 212 689 7171). This remarkable $US300, 75 gram `pen' will plug into your notebook's (shared) printer port, take its power from the keyboard port and `read' any text you run it over with real time optical character recognition spurting text straight into an InfoSelect window (or any word processor).
It reads a line at a time of any magazine, newspaper or other document, guided by your hand at up to 5.8cm (100 characters) per second - and, crucially, worked perfectly for me straight out of the box. It will even recognise the text of 11 major languages and set user-configurable recognitions to convert, say, any dollar sign into $USD.
The only question is whether you'll get any work done after everyone crams around to get a look...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
ENDS