Advanced Diary - Not Just For Kids

There are a number of journaling programs out there, but the ones I’ve looked at all had cutesy interfaces, or calculated your horoscope and biorhythms and counted the change in your pockets by radar while registering all the full moons since the birth of Herod, or the code is messed up, or you have to p-a-y for it.
If you’ve been on a similar quest, you know what I mean. Clunky! Expensive! (And mostly unnecessary.)

I had pretty-much given up, resorting to keeping my files in a “my documents” folder on the key chain drive and using the native word processor on whatever machine I happened to have handy. Sort of clumsy. Finally, a few months ago, I ran across Advanced Diary on a freeware page and thought, “What the heck? One… more… time….”

This is a seriously clean-cut, sophisticated program. By sophisticated, I mean that it provides just about everything you need, and not one thing more; it’s not a junk heap of every gadget the writer could cludge up or steal from the open source sites. Basically it’s a word processor with its own file system organized by dates.

There are two views. In “calendar view” there’s a small calendar in the upper left corner that shows the current month, date today, and numbers in boldface for dates where there are things filed. You can move back and forth by month or by year using arrow buttons. Beneath it on the Explorer-like side panel is the file tree, showing your “diaries.” As far as I can tell these are unlimited, and you can build sub-folders as well.

In “document tree” view you can expand all the diary folders to display their contents, organized by date. This brings up the only real flaw I’ve found: You can’t store stuff in the folders by name; they go in under date only. This means you can’t scan the tree to find a particular item, making the app the least bit less amenable to uses beyond journaling. There’s a powerful search feature, though, so that shouldn’t be a major problem - and how many documents are you going to produce on one day in the same category, anyway?

In the right-hand panel is the word processor. It’s a full-featured .rtf editor - handy, as .rtf is the de facto universal format for uncomplicated documents. It will handle links to pages within the program, or to files and other sites outside. You can insert images, which become part of the document, not linked. There is support for simple tables and the usual formatting, including bullets and numbering, font color, and highlighting. It will justify page margins. There is auto-save, (select how often,) backup capability to the program file or other location, and spell checking - as you go, with the familiar squiggly red lines, or all at once in a window. The file is about 3.5 MB, (remember, it contains a fairly sophisticated word processor,) but small enough for a keychain drive. Your files cannot be decrypted without the Advanced Diary program, so I’d back up a copy along with the other files.

Files can be saved as .rtf or encrypted. When you specify a password, it not only locks the program but automatically encrypts anything already saved. This could be a little bit confusing if you back up your files elsewhere and then change passwords. I’d settle on one good one, and stick with it. See my previous article on password selection.

I like this program. I use it a lot. Try it. I’m betting you will, too.