Do you keep a journal/diary/any sort of log? Time to go digital.

I, for one, have never been the kind of person to have a journal/diary; and the closest thing I have ever had to any sort of “log” was an year round “interactive notebook” (aka Haha-I-give-you-busy-work) we had to keep for Biology. Even for that notebook I never made entries on time: the name of the game was “see how many days of entries you can make up in one night [before notebook check]”. If my ex-bio teacher is reading this, let me assure her that I am just joking. If she is not, let me assure you I hated that notebook.

Anyway, just because I have never done it does not mean other people have not/do not. So when I came across a software that goes by the name of EfficientDiary I thought “what a simple, yet elegant and complete, software – why not inform dotTechies about it”:

EfficientDiary is simple in the sense that is has all the features you would need for a journal/diary/log – nothing more, nothing less. The text editor supports rich text – in addition to being able to type in plain text, you can type in formatted text and insert images, hyperlinks, tables etc.; to put it simply if you can do it in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer, you can probably do it in an EfficientDiary entry. The interface is intuitive and easy to use; each journal/diary/log (known as “JDL” here on out) is password protected (you can have multiple different JDLs); each JDL entry has an automatic timestamp; you can attach files to each entry. Automatic daily saves-changes-as-you-go backups are made of your JDL (you can turn it off if you don’t want backups). If you accidentally delete your JDL entries, there is a recycle bin where you have the option of recovering it. Then there is the powerful search function: search by date (created or modified), by title, or by content. But hang on – I have yet to tell you about the best feature: there is a portable version of EfficientDiary so you can take it with you wherever you go.

The screenshot shown above is what the “main program window” looks like. As you can see, you can quickly edit your entries right then and there. However if you were to double click on a JDL entry, you also have the option of using a dedicated window:

Additionally, going back to the main program window, if you don’t like how the entries as listed, you can change the columns (“View” -> “Show Fields”):

I am sure, in fact I know, there are other features I have yet to discuss about EfficientDiary; but I am confident you get the point: EfficientDiary allows you to create, save, and manage your entries without breaking a sweat.

You can download EfficientDiary from the following links: