Franklin Covey PlanPlus
Franklin Covey's PlanPlus version 5 is the computer version of their planner pages, with the bonus being that it's on your computer, and therefore
you can keep records going back as far as you want to without worrying about having to print out a lot of paper. However, in practice and reality,
the program is more cumbersome and troublesome than it's worth.
From the initial install, I knew there was going to be a problem. It initially failed because it had trouble loading something it calls Binder; I'm still
not sure what that is. I had to unload it and try again, and this time it made it almost all the way through, then it failed when trying to add the
printer; after multiple tries it's never been able to find my printer. At least there was a workaround so I could eventually print pages from it, if I so
chose to do so.
The program opens sluggishly. This is after a software update by the company, which was supposed to stabilize some major issues; it does open faster
than it used to, but not by much. Once open, it looks beautiful, a lot like the planner pages you can buy. You have the option of changing colors also,
which is nice, and you can still use some of the things Franklin Covey is known for, such as goal setting, life priority setting, etc. One of the features
it has that I absolutely love is the daily record; I'm one of those people who occasionally likes to write narratives of my day so that I can do a search
for them later, which having it on your computer allows you to do easily.
Of course, one buys this program so they can sync it with their Palm, and this is where things really start to bog down. I like keeping everything
on both my Palm and on the computer; the program really isn't set up for that. Oh, not that it won't do it, but what it will do is start duplicating,
triplicating, etc, and at some point it becomes to unwieldy that you end up having to manually go in and delete entries from one or the other,
especially if you're talking about years instead of month's worth of information. I don't know how many times I've had to go into each and delete
information, and, unfortunately, I've lost a bunch of notes because it can only store so much information, so once it starts all the copying it keeps
the early parts of the messages and deletes the rest. In other words, I might have the first 10 lines 10 times, though I actually wrote 20 lines the
first time around. That didn't make me a happy man; neither did having to go back in and delete, individually mind you, 15 to 20 entries of
calendar dates that kept multiplying.
At this point, I have basically figured that I've paid my $100 and just written it off as a loss. I have stopped using it and gone back to the Palm desktop
program that came with the Palm itself. The only feature it doesn't have, unfortunately, is the daily notes, which is bothersome, but for the moment
I can deal with it because, at least without using the Franklin Planner software, it syncs up quickly (maybe a minute as opposed to, believe it or
not, 7 or 8 hours).
Of course the Franklin people blamed the Palm people, but don't buy that hype. I've talked with 4 other people who bought the same software, and
it's bombed for all of them. I don't know if anyone bought the version that syncs with Microsoft Outlook, since I don't use Outlook, so maybe that
version works better. However, I doubt it, as it would seem illogical for one version of the same product to work and another version to not work.
So, unless you have no plans to ever sync your Palm with your computer, stay away from PlanPlus; you'll just be throwing your money away. At least
the service people seemed nice enough,… that is, when I could reach someone. Stick to the paper planners; they look good, and will never fail you.
