CNET Editors' review
Maple Professional allows users to create tree-style hierarchies to organize information. Although the program is fairly simple to use, some of its functions didn't perform as expected.
The program's interface is basic and intuitive. The screen is split into two parts, with the user's tree on the left and the contents of each node of the tree on the right. Users can easily add nodes to the tree with the click of a button. Most of the other buttons on the interface are related to text formatting and should be familiar to users of Microsoft Office products. We found it easy to create a tree and add nodes, and the program lends itself very well to simply typing text into the contents of each node. This could be used to keep a journal organized by year and month, or to create an outline with topics and subtopics. However, we had trouble embedding other objects into the contents of our tree. We followed the instructions in the built-in Help file to try to embed an existing Word document in the tree, but nothing happened. The program has a separate function to allow users to create a new Word document to be embedded, but that didn't seem to work either. We searched the Help file for indications that we were doing something wrong, but there was no such information. We were able to insert images and shapes.
Maple Professional has a 30-day trial period. It installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program with reservations; it's easy to use, but we're not sure it's fully functional.
Publisher's Description
From Crystal Office Systems:
Maple Professional enables you to create hierarchical trees for storing information such as documents, notes, and images. You can create unlimited nodes and sub-nodes and assign any document to each node. You can easily create a backup copies of your trees with a backup system and encrypt confidential documents. It supports rich text formatting as well as drag-and-drop. It features backup system, built-in calculator, built-in file encryption, integration with Microsoft Word spell checker, grammar checker and thesaurus, custom node icons, and import folder content.
What's new in this version: Version 7.41 includes support for Office 2007/2010 documents, Catalan translation, and minor changes and fixes.
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Results 1-3 of 3
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"Great note-taking tool"
Version: Maple Professional 7.33
Pros
Tree-structure
Easy, intuitive
Drag-and-drop re-structuring
Supports hyperlinks
ExportableCons
Can't think of any
Summary
I use Maple Pro to take notes in meetings & conferences. Also useful for brain-storming. The key feature is that the only inherent structure is the tree. I.e., topic B is under topic A, etc. I use MS OneNote, too, and love it. But with OneNote, you need to have some sense of the structure before you add content, i.e., this is going to be a section, here's a page, here's a subpage, etc. With Maple you don't need a pre-defined structure. You can just take notes, embedding them as you see fit at the time, as the discussion develops, and according to what's interesting to you, and then restructure them later in a more formal way. Very useful tool. I bought the Pro version and am glad I did.
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"A good, well-designed PIM... is this enough ?"
Version: Maple Professional 6.2
Pros
Maple Pro is an efficient and easy to use program to manage your personal information. The interface is clear, well-designed, and you probably won't need to read the help file to create your 1st notes. Unfortunately, the program is not really "different" from what you can find in the (other) best PIMs (Personal Information Managers) like GoldenSection Notes, Jot+ Notes, My Notes Center, My Notes Keeper, MyInfo and so on...
Cons
All these programs have their advantages and their "drawbacks". Maple is not my prefered program, NOT because it's not a good program (Maple Pro is a very good PIM), but because of all the things that should come with the program: the updates are not frequent, a minor bug has not been fixed in v6.25 (released today), and the program is really not the best if, like me (...), you want to export to / import from RTF files (URLs not always detected). So... If you don't care about the colored interface & icons, try the other programs too! Or download KeyNote (freeware)! Faster, more configurable, comes with a lot of options that you will probably never find in Maple Pro.
Last but not least... Approximately NO visible change between v6.22 and v6.25. And this is the worst point about Maple & Maple Pro in my opinion: some other PIMs become more and more efficient (My Notes Center and My Notes Keeper for example), while some programs like Maple Pro or Jot+ Notes don't seem to have changed for several years! An important detail, when you intend to find a program to store most of your personal data! My preference would probably go somewhere else.
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"Full Featured Notes and Information "Journal" with Tree Views"
Version: Maple Professional 6.2
Pros
This is a very well designed full featured Tree-viewed Journal that one can use to store, record, and keep track of just about anything.
Cons
Menu icons and toolbar views are small and have no "larger view" option. Once in a while a strange line or character appears and then once I type, it disapears.
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