 Durant
& Cheryl
Imboden'sEurope for Visitors europeforvisitors.com |
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EuroData Travel Planner ABOVE: From EuroData's calendar screen, you can access or move destinations, hotels, trip notes, etc. for each day of your trip itinerary.
When I plan a trip, I often begin by printing out a blank calendar sheet and pencilling a tentative itinerary in the blank squares. Many erasures and calendar sheets later, I have a day-by-day schedule of where I'll be and how I plan to get there. Now I've found a better way: EuroData, a Windows program that software author Scott W. Peterson first introduced as a DOS application in 1992 and bills as "the world's most popular personal itinerary planner." Peterson claims that Version 2.5 "makes travel planning point-and-click, drag-and-drop easy." It installs from a downloaded file or a single 3.5" diskette and takes up just 1Mb to 2Mb on your hard drive. Best of all, the price is right: only US $10, plus 77 cents for shipping and handling if you order the diskette version. EuroData's interface is built around seven main screens: Calendar Screen. This view, shown in the screen capture above, shows your day-by-day itinerary with captions such as "May 12, Paris" and "May 16 (enroute)." Right-click on a date, and a pop-up menu gives you a choice of "Nation," "City," "Hotel," "Travel," or "Daily Notes." You can select from the available choices or add entries (such as hotels) of your own. The "Daily Notes" window (shown as a white box in the screen capture) is a pop-up box where you can enter appointments, notes for your personal travel journal, etc. Itinerary Budget. As you plan your trip, you can keep track of estimated and real expenses with an onscreen budget book. Enter 10 days of parking at US $8, and the budget module will automatically display both the daily amount and the total 10-day parking expense while adding $80 to your trip total. Where necessary, the program converts foreign currencies into U.S. dollars. (You can download regularly updated exchange rates from EuroData's Web site.) |
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