1 300 737 205DayMate could be considered your legendary mate (in Aussie terms) as it is your reliable and multifaceted daily planner. Always forgetful of when important meetings are on? Never remembering birthdays and relying on facebook to tell you whose birthday it is this week? Well DayMate is what you need. All those appointments, events, birthdays all into one. Although… it is loaded with many more features than simply scheduling significant events. For example, you can set it to open a particular websites or dial a phone number over Skype at a prescheduled time. Saves you time when everything is rolled into one isn’t it? DayMate is currently compatible with Windows (2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1) and Windows Server (2003/2008/2012). Sorry Apple operating systems… for the moment you miss out! Let’s have a quick run through of the features of DayMate.
Features
Key Features of DayMate:
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- Time, all-day, and multi-day appointments
- Recurring appointments
- Customizable clock
- Support for Skype
- Current time announced by real human voice
- Gantt charts
- Powerful alarms with custom messages and sounds
- Customizable calendar
- Export to PDF
- Support for Microsoft Outlook and iCalendar
- Password protection
- Backup and restore
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Interface
DayMate is similar to Microsoft Office programs in layout. The menu bar is located from the top left hand side and the operation icons are located underneath. The calandar is shown in the rest of the pane which can be altered to day/month/week/gnatt view.
Make a new appointment
Let’s generate a new appointment. Select the green plus icon.
A ‘New Appointment’ dialog box opens. We name the appointment ‘Pay bills’ and select what type of operation we want to carry out from the drop down list. For our example, we select ‘Open Website’.
This appointment is going to be recurring (monthly). We click ‘Recurrence’ which pops up to give us additional settings. We configure these and press OK.
We add in the website we want to open at the prescheduled time. We click ‘OK’ to finalise the appointment.
When it is 12:00 the website will automatically open. Simple!
After more configuring we have completely decked out our calendar. Looks like a busy week coming up!
Import Outlook appointments
To integrate Outlook calendar appointments into Daymate, navigate to File – Import and Export – Import from Outlook.
Voila! the appointments have been successfully imported into Daymate.
Cost
The evaluation version of DayMate is free. If you are satisfied with trialing DayMate then purchasing one user license is $19.95. Crystal Office Systems also offer a discount if your purchase multiple user licenses.
Registration provides access to advanced features on DayMate including:
* All-day appointments
* Monthly recurrence
* One year of free upgrades
* Free online technical and customer support
Support
For users that require assistance with DayMate, there is a ‘Help’ section in the application where you can check for updates and gather further information about particular components of the program. Crystal Office Systems offer a Support page on their website which contains a variety of useful options such as Frequently Asked Questions, Activation Code Troubleshooting and a Forum.
If you continue to experience problems, Crystal Office Systems can be contacted directly via email or a contact form through their website.
Final Thoughts
DayMate excels at performing as a resourceful and reliable day planner for professional and personal use. We managed to sync our calendar appointments from Outlook to DayMate (and vice versa) with ease and no outstanding issues. Appointments/Operations we scheduled (such as a website opening, number to call on Skype, shutting down the computer) worked perfectly. Although it appears as a relatively simple program, it is packed with an abundance of features that make purchasing DayMate worthwhile. DayMate is suitable for any level of computer user. Recommended!