E-Z Contact Book

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 11, 2011

Contact managers don't have to be complex to be useful, and E-Z Contact Book takes that fact and runs with it. This simple program makes it easy to keep track of friends, family, business associates, and anyone else, and it includes a few extra features that set it above the no-frills competition.

E-Z Contact Book's interface is plain and intuitive, and we had no trouble getting started with it. To add contacts, you must first create a new group within the All Contacts heading. This makes it easy to keep contacts from different parts of your life organized and easy to find. For each contact, you can then add both personal and business contact information, a birthday, and notes. The program has a search feature, an important component of any contact manager that you're going to use for more than a few people, but what really impressed us were some of the other features that you don't always see in programs of this type. You can click on a contact's e-mail address to launch a default e-mail program and click on Web addresses to go to the Web site--fairly typical features--but you can also click on a phone number to initiate a call using Skype. You have to have Skype installed for this to work, of course, and the typical fees apply, but those who are already fans of Skype will appreciate this feature. We also loved it that the program will automatically launch Google Maps and show the location of a contact's address. An online Help file is well-written and thorough. Overall, we were quite impressed with E-Z Contact Book; we loved that it doesn't go overboard with features of questionable value but instead includes just a few, really useful extras in an easy-to-navigate interface.