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More than 20 years ago, the godfather of Australian tech journalism, Charles Wright, wrote in this column that personal information manager Infoselect was a good enough reason to invest in a PC, and that he considered a PC without it a waste of money.
Strong stuff, but sometimes a program really is that important. Just ask any accountant who was around when the first spreadsheets VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 were released.
Long time readers will know that for us, the killer app is FileCenter, a document manager integrated with dozens of tools for streamlining your workday processes.
While we mostly jumped ship to Apple three years ago, there's a single reason we still run a PC as well: there's no version of FileCenter for Mac. For our small professional services firm it's mission critical, and version 10, due for release next month, brings welcome enhancements to an already powerful tool.
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At heart, FileCenter is a document organiser.
Many of its pricey competitors vacuum your Word, Excel and PDF files into a complex database that's a nightmare to back out of. Without the program, your data is difficult to access. But FileCenter simply overlays an ordinary Windows folder system.
Even if you stopped using it, your files are just as accessible as before you installed it, except probably much more neatly arranged.
The program's visual paradigm is immediately intuitive. On the left are cabinets that hold drawers that contain folders that store documents that are viewable in a preview panel at right of screen.
With a folder open you can up and down arrow through its contents, viewing files in different formats without having to open any of the programs that created them.
To that solid base, FileCenter adds not so much bells and whistles as a virtual symphony orchestra. The scanning module works with most modern scanners and eliminates the need for those ungainly control interfaces that are supplied as standard.
If the OCR tool wasn't the best in the world, it has always been good enough for us, easily converting scanned documents to editable format.
We always have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro on board because there are some high end tricks that only it can perform. But FileCenter's inbuilt PDF creation tools are as good as most will ever need.
Version 10 polishes the interface, adding optional themes to brighten up your working day. The control ribbon can now be shrunk or auto-collapsed if you prefer a more minimalist look.
The PDF tools also get a boost. For the first time, FileCenter can redact a PDF, securely blocking out selected text so a document can be circulated with commercial-in-confidence portions obscured.
They've also added Bates stamping, so a unique page number can be applied to a composite document without its own consistent numbering scheme. Instead of asking a judge to search out page 24 of the second schedule to exhibit P of the witness' affidavit, you need only refer her to Bates page number 350.
A new FileCenter Pro Plus edition also includes automated clean up of documents scanned into PDF. Legacy documents scanned for archiving are often marred by speckling, page skewing, punch holes and other artefacts.
No automated tool can render a faded old contract as a pristine image, but the more you can do to sharpen and clean the image at the point of capture, the better. For one thing, it increases the accuracy of text recognition for indexing purposes.
The top end version also licenses in Nuance Communication's OmniPage OCR engine, giving a speed and accuracy boost to the standard module. If you plan to digitise a library of ageing historical material and enjoy the benefits of text indexing, this is valuable.
Like Acrobat, the Pro Plus release can now save a PDF file as a Word or Excel document. Don't expect miracles here. On a planet where just a handful can consistently format a Word file, it's unfair to expect a PC to be perfect.
But for a few quick edits to a document where you only have a paper original, conversion is fine.
Pricing for the new versions isn't yet on show, but users with annual maintenance expiring after 31 May have been assured of a free upgrade, and existing users can add licences for a limited time at a 30 per cent discount and also upgrade to version 10 for no more.
Peter Moon is a technology lawyer with Cooper Mills. peter.moon@coopermills.com.au