Act for Windows

User Reviews

• SOFTWARE DESIGNED BY A COMMITTEE

  roger-thatApril 12, 2014

  Pros

  None lately.

  Cons

  Bloatware, plain and simple. Fights with itself. Has headaches that YOU then get. Tries to be everything to everyone and ends up being useless to so many. Terrible decline in performance.

  Summary

  Back in 1988 I was using a DOS version of ACT!. I was in service & support, and it tracked my call data, topics discussed, time & date-stamped everything, dialled the phone for me with a single click, and ran smoothly and flawlessly. Over the ensuing years, it kept getting bought out by ever-bigger companies. And made bigger and bigger. And for awhile, the Windows versions were compact, lean and smart. Then, somewhere between 2000 and 2005, somebody told the owners about the term "Bloatware", and they just went nuts on it. Like the time a committee redesigned Robocop in V2, they tried to pack EVERYTHING into it, packed in some dodgy SQL versions that ran when they felt like it, and the whole bloody mess took up great masses of disk space. Performance plummeted, frustrations skyrocketed, and the simple, functional versatile nature of the program was utterly lost. Where I could use it all day and get lots and lots of work done, I spent hours and hours just tweaking the thing like a frickin' house of cards, every part just so, and fragile... some wind of change or update comes along and the whole mess collapses again. I gave up on it and can never go back, except to a version earlier than or up to ACT!2000. What a disaster. Their CEOs should take a serious read of this entire CNET review page, and give their f@#$%^&in' heads a shake. Strip it back down, make it something versatile and light, instead of an overweight, bloated and endlessly frustrating mess of coding.

  ---

• Do not upgrade to act pro 2011

  albenkertJuly 18, 2011

  Pros

  Older versions of act were great for keeping tract of contacts and writing notes on them them for future reference.

  Cons

  he conversion took multiple hours and several tries with their support lines. Software blows up with an addressing error when you try to shut it down frequently. Software frequently requires SQL to be restarted. Very labor intensive for notes

  Summary

  Do not upgrade if you are an old act user if there is anyway to avoid it.

  ---

• Great product, easy to customize, very reliable.

  mtbgroveMay 25, 2009

  Pros

  Customized over 25 fields to track client information, easy to sycn with blackberry. Amazing amount of capablity if you take to the time to learn how to use it.

  Cons

  This is not really a con, but the learning curve is step. It is a database reporting system similar to Crystral Reports with an Acess like database.

  Summary

  The ablity to customize. Sycn with Blackberry including customer account info. Creating mailing lables for entire database. Reliable. I have used ACT for 20 years.

  ---

• Horrible; unstable. Not user-friendly. Limited functionality.

  vex1March 4, 2007

  Pros

  You get what you pay for. I am able to plug my way through what I need to do for importing and mail merge but there's a lot of manual steps.

  Cons

  ACT! 2005 crashes all the time sometimes with out error -- just crashes. <p> It requires company name but sometimes I only have individual names so those individual's become company names. There's a lot of tweaking of the data because of that. It's generally bad to use a field for two different uses. This is coming from someone who has an I.T. background in ERP systems so I deal with databases all the time. <p> Trying to use mail merge, it doesn't handle all fonts that MS word has. The software has an option to change the editor but doesn't allow you to change it so you're stuck with the software's database. Hence, I was forced to copy/paste into MS Word and so a replace all on a font. I doubt you could use this software without another word editor. <p> There's no conditional formatting (or the documentation and google doesn't elude to ACT! having this feature) for mail merge or importing. <p> There's 10 custom fields and I'm using many of them. I have to keep a paper taped to my computer to remind me of the custom field's meaning. There's no way to create a custom label or heading for that column.

  Summary

  ---

• If You Have XP Pro, DON'T BUY ACT!!

  John370March 9, 2006

  Pros

  Looked nice for the few minutes it actually ran on my computer

  Cons

  To get it to run on my brand new Dell with Windows XP Pro, I had to talk to 3 techs over a 6 hour span that were in India and hard to understand. After giving one of them access to mess with my internal files online for a couple hours, ACT finally worked but slowed my computer way down. I restored my system to before they messed with it, and sent the software back. <p> <p>DON'T BOTHER!! If it were any good, why do they come out with a new version every year? By the way, all customer support wants you to do is buy a support plan for $300 (oh but they'll give you $100 off if within 30 days of purchase. Big F***ing deal. Hey Sage, here's a thought, how about giving me software that actually works so I don't have to be on the phone with support. Also, there are classes you can take to learn the software for about $1,200. So, if you have money shooting out your a$$, and time to burn talking to a support person you don't understand, then this software is for you!!

  Summary

  ---

• Don't Buy ACT2006!!!!!!!!

  RHScottJanuary 5, 2006

  Pros

  I'm trying to find something

  Cons

  I just spent 2.5 days trying to get ACT2006 to reload after it crashed and I unstalled it. The crash took my current database. Thank God for a 90 percent backup in ACT2005 on another computer!It has bugs that can't be fixed. One "fix" when printed out was two pages and NOT something an average user should tackle. I tried a live internet chat on one issue and the person on the other, who I think was in another country, simply could not get what I was saying or communicate understandably. I finally got it back up and running but barely. I am now stuck with it, because you can't go back. I tried to uninstall it and put ACT2005 back on but ACT2005 acted oddly. I am so PO's I am thinking of going over to Microsoft Outlook. When you think about going to Microsoft as an improvement, that's pretty damning. DON'T buy this until there is a new version that Sage software's CEO will stake his life and childrens' lives on. It is hell!!!!!!

  Summary

  ---

• this is the worst piece of software ever inflicted on an unsuspecting planet

  johndigbyluxtonDecember 17, 2005

  Pros

  there is nothing to recommend this truly awful travesty against humanity. maybe I like the fact that someone had the sense of humour to develop something so completely horrible and then charge people for the experience of trying to survive it

  Cons

  the internet isn't big enough to contain the issues with ACT 7. I have been a loyal user since ACT 2.0 and have even made various companies I have been with use it over the years and until v.7 it was fantastic. But now, it uses more resources than the entire NASA space programme, it crashes more often than my Grandmother full of gin, it takes longer to get started and warmed up than a nun at a prayer retreat and best of all, once you convert to it, you can never, ever go back. I have had slimy salesmen telling me that it is just fine and the next patch will fix the few small glitches (which of course never happens). Then, I speak to a techie who not only knows and enthusiastically sums up his product as "absolute crap", but admits that it is so awful, they are completely rewriting it. Thankfully, we will all have the fabulous opportunity to spend yet more money buying it all over again.... unless someone can tell me of something that will do the job ACT is supposed to without the tears. Please help...

  Summary

  ---

• Stay with your "old" version

  dab1100July 29, 2005

  Pros

  I do like the fact that you can add unlimited secondary contacts, but that does not offset the other terrible features of this supposed upgrade.

  Cons

  This program is terrible! It was released with many bugs. When you go to their site, they tell you the bug was fixed with the updates.... it hasn't been. Forget about Customer Service. You get 30 days free, and every time you call, you get a hard-sell for support packages or books and then get stuck on hold for 45 minutes. Once you get someone they generally just e-mail you something from their database which in many cases doesn't work anyway. The program is slow... it consumes great amounts of memory and lacks many of the convenience features that former versions have. The reports take forever to compile. You can't change the default colors on one of the priorites which means it's sky-blue color is virtually illegible on screen or in print. You have to go through extra steps to print out a task list. The dates do not roll over correctly, you lose information when inputting the "regarding" field, and the program randomly crashes. Importing database from previous version is cumbersome... it takes about an hour. <p>If it weren't for the fact that my earlier version did not support Pocket PC I would have sent it back for a refund during the 30-day trial. If you think you must try it, download the 30-day trial from the interenet and be sure to keep your old program loaded and the database handy. You'll probably want to go back after a week. If there are any attorneys out there, you might want to consider a class action suit against the software maker. It simply does not do what it claims to do.

  Summary

  ---

• Complete Waste of Time and Money

  dustincobbApril 18, 2005

  Pros

  NONE!

  Cons

  Slow, Inconsistant, full of bugs that tech support can not fix or explain. My company has wasted over 40 man hours trying to resolve these issues. Our last option...unistall and light on fire! Burn ACT Burn you useless piece of *^$%!

  Summary

  ---

• So Slow - Unusable

  iteamsApril 9, 2005

  Pros

  I don't see any!

  Cons

  This new version is completly unusable, it is so slow. You can click the mouse and nothing happens for 30 seconds. I have two brand new high end computers. <p> <p>They have had three patches in the last few weeks, what does that tell you. The new one is 53MB. <p> <p>Support, what support!

  Summary

  ---