AddressGrabber Reviews

2 useful utilitites help you save time working on Web

By Peter Kent

I'm a little wary of reviewing software these days. I hate to recommend that anyone install more programs on their Windows system, because you can never tell when you'll tip your system over the top.

The more software you install, the more unstable your system will become. Ah, but that's another article (and one that I've written before, in fact.)

Still, I've run into a couple of utilities recently that are very useful to anyone who spends a lot of time working on the Web. One helps you deal with all those passwords and account names you've probably been accumulating. And the other is a fantastic system for grabbing addresses and dropping them into a database or address book.

For a few years now I've been using a program called Password Pro. It was a simple piece of freeware produced by ComputerLife Magazine, essentially a password-protected database in which you could store account names and passwords for any system -- you could store your ATM card numbers, account information for online services and Internet Service Providers, passwords for private Web sites, and so on.

It's a simple and rather crude system; it's better than nothing, but a long way from perfect. Let's say I want to enter a Web site -- for instance, I want go to my bank's Web site and log on so that I can see my account balances. I have to either enter the URL into the browser, or use a bookmark to go to the site. Then I have to open Password Pro, search for the appropriate entry, copy the account name, paste it into the Web page, go back to Password Pro, copy the password, then paste that into the Web page. Too many steps for me.

Surely there had to be something better, I thought. So I went searching for that something, and found WebPasskey (www.maxlock.com/wp/). This is a great little program. Here's how it works.

First, I open WebPasskey; as with Password Pro, I have to enter a password to get into the program. Once it's open, an icon is placed in the taskbar. Now I can right-click on that icon, and select Launch URL.

A submenu opens, showing a list of accounts that I've entered into the progr am. I select my bank name, and my browser automatically opens the appropriate page for me. But there's more. If things go well, WebPasskey automatically enters my account name and password into the correct fields in the Web page, and submits the page -- that is, WebPasskey logs on for me. Now, for some reason this doesn't always work correctly. I'm not exactly sure why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but if it doesn't work, it's not too hard to log in.

I can right-click on the taskbar icon, and select Create Link; I then click on the account name in the submenu that opens, and the mouse pointer turns into an arrow with the word LOG next to it. Then I can point at the Account Name field (or User ID field, or whatever it's called) in the Web page and click ... and the account name is dropped into the field. Then I click on the Password field, and the password is dropped in. Then I click on Submit, and away I go.

The utility can be a little confusing in some ways. For instance, some of the labels and procedure names don't seem to make sense (why "Create Link," for instance). And I haven't figured out why sometimes it can do it all, and on other occasions I have to finish the job for it. But nonetheless, it's a great little utility that saves me a lot of time and trouble.

The other program, AddressGrabber (www.prodexusa.com/), is quite remarkable. I've been using it to grab addresses from e-mail that I receive, and insert the address into ACT!™, a "contact management" program, but it also can be used to grab addresses from Web pages.

When I open AddressGrabber a tool bar appears at the top of the screen. When I want to grab an address, I highlight the address in the e-mail message, then click on a button in the tool bar. A box appears, with a variety of address fields -- First Name, Last Name, Street Address, City, and so on.
I can see where the program has placed each item it found in the highlighted text, and I must say it does remarkably well; even if the information I've highlighted is not in the proper order (perhaps the e-mail address appears next to the person's name, and is followed by the street address on the line below), AddressGrabber can usually figure out what's what.
It's not 100 percent correct, of course, but I can quickly change or move entries if needed. When I'm finished I click on Transfer Data, and the information is dropped into ACT!™; into the correct fields, of course.
This program really can save a lot of time. The major problem is -- and this strikes me as a little bizarre -- it doesn't seem to have a Country field (so you have to enter it yourself). But you can work with a variety of different programs -- GoldMine®, Organizer, Maximizer, Eudora, Outlook®, CardScan, Seiko SLP, Smart BCR, Palm®pilot, My Address and Lotus Organizer.
(Some of the more advanced -- and therefore more expensive -- versions even work with Fedex Ship and Airborne Express.)
These programs do very simple things, things that may seem quite insignificant. But they're things that seem to take up a lot of my day, more and more of my time as time progresses, in fact. Sometimes it's worth a little time and a little money (these programs are shareware; both are around $29) to deal with these "insignificant" hassles.

Peter Kent is author of "Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site," Top Floor Publishing. Visit http://PoorRichard.com/ for sample chapters, table of contents, almost 800 useful links for people setting up Web sites, examples of free and low-cost Web-site utilities, and more.