Open Contacts

Flexible address book with CRM features

Organizing contacts is an increasingly difficult task no matter who you are - if you add together all of the contacts on your mobile, e-mail and other external devices, it would probably be enough to go round the moon twice - or something like that.

Open Contacts is a brave attempt at trying to tie all these contacts together. The first thing that strikes you is that, it's not exactly the best looking program you've ever seen. Open Contacts is more like an Excel spreadsheet with a few tasteless looking pink fields here and there. However, once you get Open Contacts working, you realise that it's not just an ugly face. The Open Contacts application has presets for various types of contact namely People and Companies. Both follow the same principle and the default layout gives you four fields within each one which you can move about. Each Open Contacts field expands into a whole page which allows you to enter just about everything from their eye colour to their favourite food if you so choose. In fact, few people will want or need to go into so much detail about their contacts but this is supposed to be a definitive kind of contacts book that you will refer to time and again although you get the feeling it's more like a police database at times. Open Contacts could have done with a few wizards to take you through the whole process a few times to begin with although the help file is extensive.

Open Contacts does help link and divide your contacts but it could do with a much better looking interface and a more simpler data fields for most people's needs.