Effective Meetings

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 08, 2009

This simple but well-designed program ensures that your meetings and attendees stay on task. It offers an easy-to-navigate user interface that will appeal to all user levels.

Effective Meetings opens with a professional, straightforward user interface. Menu and command buttons run across the top of the window for creating new meeting agendas. The features are organized by categories that break down the meeting process (General, Attendees, Preparation, Agenda, and Minutes) and each can be accessed by either clicking the appropriate command button at the top or by clicking the appropriate tab at the bottom of the window. We quickly walked through the process of entering our meeting's name, purpose, desired outcome, and location. It was incredibly easy to create an agenda. All we had to do was enter a title, select the speaker (pulled from the attendee list) from a drop-down menu, and enter the number of minutes for each. When it came to publishing the meeting agenda, we checked off the items we wanted to include (minutes, tasks), added a custom logo, and chose a document format. Our agenda was saved as a PDF and looked extremely professional when printed.

The program does include a built-in Help feature, but it's not very detailed. However, the program is so easy to use that we doubt you'll need it. The 30-day trial is more than enough time to learn the program's ins and outs. We highly recommend this program for anyone looking to keep meetings productive.