Linked Notes Free

Anyone who's ever used Wikipedia--and who hasn't?--can appreciate the ease of organization that wikis provide, letting users create collections of interlinking pages with increasing levels of detail about specific topics. Linked Notes Free Edition is an easy-to-use program for creating notes using a wiki format. While the program doesn't let you create actual wiki Web sites, it is an innovative and extremely useful tool for organizing notes.

The program's interface is simple, with a tree hierarchy on the left that displays pages that the user has created. To create a page, we simply clicked the New button and entered our desired title. The genius of Linked Notes Free Edition is that it automatically creates links in existing pages when new ones are created. For example, we created a page about pants and listed several types: jeans, Capri pants, and so on. We then created a new page, titled it "jeans," and wrote a few sentences about denim pants. When we returned to our original pants page, the word "jeans" had automatically turned into a link to our page about jeans. Pretty neat, right? Although the program doesn't have much in the way of word processing features, there are basic text formatting tools, and pages can be exported as RTF or TXT files. Since the program is portable, you can take it along on a USB drive and have access to your notes wherever you go.

A link to an online Help file took us to a page promising that Help was "coming soon," but that's okay; Linked Notes is pretty easy to figure out. Overall, we were quite impressed with Linked Notes Free Edition, and we think it's a great way to organize notes on just about any topic.

Linked Notes Free Edition installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly.