[Neill Watson]

I'm stuck at the moment. I found Omni Outliner on my new MacBook and began using it, now loving it. I used to use a pen and paper diary by Time Manager and the layout is almost identical.

While waiting for OmniFocus to launch, I've downloaded a trial of Contactizer. It's pretty good, but I think OmniFocus will fit my GTD learning curve better. So my query is, will OmniFocus do a lot of the things that Contactizer does now?

Things like linking to Address Book and linking contacts to items and tasks. One thing I'm pretty sure OmniFocu will not do will be a traditional merge of contacts to a direct mail letter in Word.

If anyone has any thoughts on how OmniFocus might work with or instead of Contactizer, I'd love to hear it.

Regards

[pvonk]

I'm not familiar with Contractizer, but judging from info on the web, this is a PIM and doesn't seem to support the GTD philosophy. This app is an all-in-one program including multi-user support for sharing contacts, events, etc. (I may have missed mention of GTD support, but I searched.) The company's site advertises this as a contact manager.

Here's one comment I found at some blog (http://mensrea.typepad.com/mens_rea/...y/index.html):

"There are two central complaints about Contactizer. First, its synching is primitive at best. It brings in all of your to-dos and appointments under the iCal called "Contactizer." This negates the ability to sort through contexts on a PDA or phone. The whole point of having such a product is to provide reminders of appointments to you SANS computer. Based on Contactizer's philosophy, I would have to sift through tons of "Next Actions" trying to figure out what the context is. Rather than streamlining it by having the proper categories embedded. How I use this is that if I am in the car and I have to make a call as a to-do I can quickly see my scheduled phone calls and chip away at them based on my ability to make the calls. Also, I have already blogged about Contactizer's absolutely sickening customer service."

This product seems very much like most other PIMs but it does have quite a large feature set! However, if you know what GTD is about, then you'll realize this probably is not the right app.

As for your questions, OF will have connections to mail (built-in or via Applescript). Merging contacts to direct mail letters in Word is like asking whether OF can do spreadsheets or do my checkbook and investment account. This just doesn't have anything to do with GTD.

[Neill Watson]

Thanks for the reply and the link, a useful read.

I guess I'll have to wait for OF, but that won't solve my problem of merging contact info to letters. I used to use Entourage, but I don't want to go back to that resource hungry monster!

Any suggestins on how to perform a mail-merge into a Word doc without using Entourage would be very much apreciated, as it's something I do quite often.

Many thanks