Maple is a well-rounded application for organizing virtually any kind of information. It allows you to gather various kinds of data and assemble them into efficient hierarchical trees. Starting with a main folder, or "node," you can create an unlimited number of branches with sibling nodes. Like the tree in Explorer, nodes may be expanded and collapsed- enabling you to access even the most minute details with minimal clicks. Nodes and sub-nodes can be renamed, added or deleted via a right-click menu. The program offers full drag and drop functionality for managing nodes and content.

Maple can store many kinds of data, from text to graphics and pictures. The program allows you to import all standard text formats such as RTF, Microsoft Word DOC and Windows WRI files. Maple actually offers many of the features you'll find in aword processor. The program supports every font attribute, enabling you to use bold, italics, super- and sub-script text. Use a variety of colors and alignments, and even build numbered and bulleted lists. Importing graphics files is just as easy.

Maple includes a built-in character map for previewing installed fonts. Further, the program is capable of converting character sets from OEM to ANSI and vice versa.

Now what would you think of a program that could substitute a few other ones such as a plain text editor, a word processor and a document cataloging tool? Try Maple to find out its true abilities.

Maple is a document manager that lets you manage, create, edit and store documents, plain text notes and images. The tool has a familiar Windows Explorer interface with its window split in two: one for the directory with nodes and documents in a tree-like style and the other for displaying the contents of the files. The tool is capable of storing plain text notes as well as complex documents. It imports and exports text files, RTF, DOC, WRI, HTML and other popular document file formats. The program offers the advantage of word processing combined with file management.

Other features of the program include a spell checker, an advanced search utility, a backup tool, a calculator and, among other useful things, integration with MS Word's spell and grammar checker. Try this tool today and check it out yourself.

As an IT professional, chances are good that you have lots of detailed information that you have to keep track of in order to do your job effectively and efficiently. You probably have a multitude of documents stored in a multitude of folders on your hard disk. Using a series of documents and folders to store all your information is a pretty logical way of doing things, especially when used in combination with Vista’s Search tool and Saved searches feature. However, it could be better — especially if all that information could be made available in one place.

Well, I recently discovered a very nice document manager called Maple from Crystal Office Systems that runs perfectly on Windows Vista and produces what is essentially a document database.

Once you have installed Maple, you can use the shortcut to launch it. When Maple runs for the first time, it will load the program’s manual. As you begin to investigate, you’ll soon discover that the program’s main user interface is very much like Windows Explorer. You’ll use the tree on the left to create nodes that can represent both folders and documents — you can even change the node icons accordingly. You’ll essentially create a folder structure for storing your documents much like you would do on your hard disk.

Maple has a ton of features that make it an ideal document database tool. You can create links to other nodes, to files on your hard disk as well as to pages on the Internet. There’s a built-in calculator, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. It has browser-like forward and back controls and even a full-screen mode.

Once you create your document database, finding what you need is very easy. Just access the Global Search feature and type your search term. You’ll then see a search results pane and can select any document. When you do, the contents are displayed and the search term is highlighted.

The functionality some applications provide is obvious from said application’s name. If you run across an application like Something Video Converter, you know that application will convert videos from one format to another. The functionality some other applications provide is not obvious from the application’s name. The Crystal Office Systems-developed application Maple falls in this category.

So what can Maple do? Why to put it bluntly, this application allows any user out there to store information in a hierarchical structure. You can store documents, you can store notes, and you can store images. You can store as much data as you want because there is no limit to the database Maple creates. If you want you can store hundreds of images.

Speaking of things that have no limit, you can create an unlimited number of nodes and sub-nodes with Maple. Then you can assign any document you want to any particular node.

That’s not all that Maple can do. Here are the other bits and pieces you can expect this application to do:

• Maple comes with full rich text editing functions, meaning that you can edit documents from within this application.
• Maple provides drag and drop support. This means you can rearrange the Maple tree by simply dragging and dragging nodes to a different location. Speaking of the tree and its structure, you must know that you can create any tree structure you want.
• Maple comes with more than 100 built-in icons that you can use to mark nodes in the tree.
• With Maple you can insert, display, print, export, and print pictures and photos.
• You can expect Maple to run from external disks or portable storage devices.

If you have a lot of information that you need to organize, then you need to give Maple a try. This application lets you organize your data as a tree-based diagram.

Maple adds some advanced commands that the pro user will find handy. Here they are:

• An advanced utility called Finder to help you search for Maple tree files.
• With Maple you can backup your tree. Backups can be archived as .zip or .cab.
• To protect your sensitive information, Maple comes with a file encryptor that uses a strong Blowfish encryption algorithm.
• A built-in calculator for when you need to, well, do some calculations.
• Maple comes with more than 100 built-in icons that you could use to identify nodes in the tree. Maple comes with the option to use custom node icons.
• You can export your Maple tree as HTML. This is handy if you want to publish the tree to the web for example.
• You can convert a Maple tree to a Microsoft HTML help file.
• With just one click, you can import multiple documents into your Maple tree.
• You can create a number of settings profiles and import them without restarting Maple.