BusinessCards 98 v5.0

I don't know what it is, but something really bugs me about ACT 4.0, the customer contact database I am supposed to be using at work. Maybe it's the design, or maybe it's just the general appearance of the program. Whatever it is, my dislike of ACT this recent weekend spawned a search through Download.com for a replacement program.

BusinessCards 98 is a neat-sounding program I found, available in a trial version from MidStream Inc, with the license costing $29.95. It has won several awards, including an AOL Editor's Choice award. It claims to be able to replace your Cardfile and keep track of textual information in an easy-to-use manner, while also being internet-enabled so that you can browse the web and send email from inside the program. Best of all, and partly what attracted me to it, the download file is less than a megabyte large, whereas most other programs were at least two megabytes.

So I decided to put BusinessCards to the test.

The first thing I noticed after I installed the program was that it looked an awful lot like Microsoft Word at the top. It has the same icons in the same type of organization. The only thing that was really different is that instead of a white screen, you see a graphical book of blank business cards in the empty space below the icon bar.

After a few moments of playing with the program, it's easy to see how simple it really is. This program really is just a Cardfile in your computer. It simulates page-turning, shows three cards to a page, and it's easier to keep your cards in perfect alphabetical order due to not having to move all the cards when you get a new one--you just click "insert card" on the File menu. For people who have time, it's even possible to format the cards with different fonts and background colors to make them look nicer.

BusinessCards is excellent for a person who just wants a computerized card file, but unfortunately that's really all it's good for. BusinessCards is not the program to replace ACT or MS Access, or any other database program, because that's really not what it's aimed for. While you can use the Find function under the Edit menu, much the same as in Word, BusinessCards really doesn't have any more advanced search functions. You can't retrieve cards for a search in a neat, organized fashion, though the Find function will look through for similar matches to a company you just can't quite remember the name of.

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