Put a Little Zoot in Your Day by Bill Machrone, PC Magazine Part PIM, part database, part editor, part activity tracker, Zoot may suit you just right Everyone wants to be better organized. Some people even buy computers for just that reason. Then they find out how hard it is to maintain their records. Despite all the help that software gives us, getting and staying organized is a discipline -- a collection of good work habits. As the quantity and the quality of online information increase, the Web has become one of the most important ways of doing research for many of us. We can shop for products, ideas, data, competitive information, or advice. One of the biggest challenges, however, is making sense of it all. How many times have you been to a site that had just the information you were looking for and then forgotten to make a note of the URL. Your browser's history file had the link -- or maybe it didn't. But to find it in the morass of URLs and poorly named pages can be tricky. Or maybe it's just gone, expired. Separating the wheat from the chaff in newsgroups can be even more frustrating. Despite the terrific features of newsreaders such as Agent and Anawave's Gravity, it can be tough to find the gem of information or the one person to whom you want to send a follow up e-mail. Quite apart from the web, you're brainstorming new ideas for a product, a presentation, or a family reunion. Like many of us these days, you think best with your fingers on the keyboard, letting the ideas flow and recording them at the same time. Wouldn't it be nice if a program lurked in the background, watching and recording your activities and then gave you all the tools you needed to categorize and annotate them? Meet Zoot, an extraordinary product that's part PIM and part text database, note editor, activity tracker and abstract builder. Zoot uses the Windows Clipboard to snag information from any windows application, but it has a special affinity for your Web browser, automatically capturing all the URLs you visit. When you're done , Zoot shows you a three pane view of your day's work: folders, links and notes. It's only a moments work to delete the links you don't want or move or copy the ones you do want into categorizing folders, and annotate them in attached note windows. Then the fun begins. You can search the library folders that you've built by surfing and culling, or you can use Zoot to call up any and all of the Web search engines via your browser. A utility feature called Agent X can search all the drives attached to your machine, making quick work of extracting information you'd previously gathered. When Zoot searches, it can generate abstracts from the files that match your search criteria. You can choose the size of the abstract -- from 50 to 5000 words. They're actually excerpts, not abstracts, as Zoot isn't aware of syntax. But it will find multiple occurrences of a word or phrase within a big file and pull out the relevant section for your later reference. Zoot is often compared with Lotus Agenda, a long discontinued DOS-based PIM that gained many strong adherents while baffling countless others. Agenda let you set up categories and cross-references and then stored and filed them by person, project, date, client, or whatever criteria were chosen. You could shift views easily, so that the relevance of the information Agenda displayed was always at its greatest. Agenda had two main problems: limited interoperation with other applications and a steep learning curve. If you didn't use if for a while, you were apt to forget some of its subtler features. Executive editor Bill Howard was a big-time user of Agenda. Bill and I once conducted a Q&A panel at a user-group meeting. Someone asked Bill, "How long did it take you to learn Agenda?" His response: "You mean -- so far?" Zoot is similarly rich in features, more powerful in most ways, and far more relevant to the kind of computing and information retrieval that most of us do today. But it's not the kind of program that you just play around in until you figure out how it works. Zoot will work best for you if you approach it methodically, learning its functions and testing its power on sample files that you download from its web site (www.zoootsoftware.com). The biggest question with any PIM /organizer is whether it's right for you and for the way you work. Though Zoot's price won't put too big a dent in your budget, the best thing about it is that it's shareware. So if you don't like it, just delete it from your drive. This article originally appeared in the November 4, 1997 issue of PC Magazine.