Notebook Report Writer 2.3.2

The fact that you're a student doesn't give you suddenly the know-how required to write and edit essays as your teachers are asking, and when using a text editor for office workers or programmers, students often end up in frustration. Since every task seems to get its software these days, a text editor for students shouldn't be something out of ordinary, so here it is: Notebook Report Writer!


Setup

Notebook Report Writer is a program written in java, so it works on virtually any popular computer platform available at this time, including Mac OS and a plethora of Linux distributions, alongside with Windows, of course.

Priced at $25, Report Writer is available as a trial version without any obvious limitations. Downloading the 1MB setup package for the Windows platform shouldn't be a problem for anyone, and installing it is just as easy. Anyway, it's interesting to note that the license agreement is one of the shortest I have ever seen, and the installation folder is the third directory in the parent folder, located in Program Files by default, making it harder to reach the location of your program, if you ever need to get there.


Interface

As you can see in the screenshot to the left, Notebook Report Writer's interface is painfully simple, since it has no toolbar, no additional panes except the one to the right, where you can see the pages of the current document, not even a status bar! Now, if you enjoy extremely simple things, you will like this program's interface, but considering its looks... you'd better grab a pen and a piece of paper, it's cheaper!


Features

The features of this program are only a few, in my opinion, but the idea is to keep things as simple as possible. After all, the secret of success is to concentrate on your task, and leave the useless things aside. Unfortunately, too many things were left aside. For example, when you open or save a file, the dialog window doesn't give you any choices for the file type to use. For example, I can write a document and save it as an EXE file. Not really funny...



The so-called document templates are simply a bad joke, and I can't call them more than this, because a document that opens with "Title", "Header" and "body body body body" with different fonts can't be really considered a document template, although it matches the definition of a template.

Features that really work and look nice are the spell checker that has learning abilities, the word count tool, and the Template tool that allows you to define your own templates.

At last, I also consider the Help "system" of this program a bad joke. Just check the Help menu, choose Report Writer Help, and you'll get what I mean. Time for some conclusions, now!


The Good

Notebook Report Writer is easy to use and can prove quite helpful for its targeted class of users, and the word count and spell checker tools, together with the template editor add some value to the package.

The Bad

Being a Java program, this application uses more system resources than it should, and its interface shows some refresh problems, overlapping other window for quite long after minimizing the application. The price is really scary, considering what you get, but especially what you don't get...

Conclusion

It could have been worse... and since this program is not a complete disaster, you can try it, and maybe you'll appreciate it more than I do. If you are going to enjoy this piece of code, please don't forget to get back here and share your thoughts with us!

Developer: Notebook Press
Price: $25
Trial Link: Download