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If you own a personal organizer you probably like to remain organized in your life. Creating lists may be part of this organization. Lists may include groceries, collectibles, things to do or many other things.

ListPro from Illium Software is available for the Pocket PC or Palm OS devices. At first glance this is just another list program.  However upon further inspection and using the list program for a few days it became apparent that this program was a lot more than a simple grocery list helper. It would do a fantastic job of creating a list for your groceries but it can also be a lot more.

With the ability to create check boxes and flag items you can have a master list but only show the flagged items if you prefer. Imagine listing every item the grocery store has then only flag the items you wish to purchase. Now only show the flagged items, check the check boxes as you go around the store collecting every flagged item. If your list was very large you could even sort the items so that the unchecked items were on the top the list. This would now be very easy to spot what items still needed to be collected. As you flag the items you could have also set-up the flagged item to be a different colour making the items to be collected even easier to spot. You can even create alarms, and the notes field can be any size for each item.

This program is very customizable, as everyone likes to be organized in different manners you can choose your own method to differentiate items, some ideas would be to indent, flag or colour code the items.

The Professional Edition includes the desktop application. Importing or exporting lists is very easy, the desktop version of ListPro can import or export TXT (Text) or CSV (comma separated values) files. These are standard formats that most spreadsheet or database programs can export to.

Ilium Software has many lists you can download from their web site if you don't want to create your own from scratch. Ilium Software is having a contest for list creation that must be submitted before April 12 2002.

As part of the testing of this software I decided to finish a project I started in 1991; a list of all the New Twilight Zone episodes. This list now has every episode aired with the following details; Title, Writer, Teleplay, Director, Cast, Episode number, original air date and even a Synopsis. Adding a check box to note which episodes have been viewed and a flag to note which episodes have been taped make this list interactive instead of just a reference. With this much detail it has become more of a database than a simple list but it was very easy to enter all this data using both the import function and entering the incomplete data via both the desktop and handheld. Searching all of this data can be done with either the desktop or handheld utilizing the search command.

Once you have all this data entered you have the option of compressing the data. With the New Twilight Episode Guide it went from 148K to 78K using compression.  

Final Words:
Don't let the name ListPro make you think this program is just a list maker. With its ease of use and customizability it can become much more. You can use it for a simple to do list, or the limits are up to your imagination.