You may recall that, eons ago, Windows had a handy little application called CardFile. It came with the Windows installation, and was a digital version of index cards. Then they discontinued it.
Now, if you’re geeky about these things, Windows CardFile was pretty basic. It was what techie people call a flat file database, not a relational one. What this means is this. Let’s say that as a writer you want to keep a file on your characters, and in which chapters they appear. With a flat file database you will have index cards for the chapters, and index cards for the characters, but these will be separate. So, if you decide to list all the characters that appear in Chapter 3 on the Chapter 3 index card, and then for each character list which chapters they appear in, you’ll have to type the same data more than once. With a relational database, you would have an easy way to automatically link the two.
Nevertheless, many writers use devices like index cards and post-it notes to keep track of their thinking, plot lines and other stuff, so let’s not dismiss the index card out of hand just yet.
AZZCardfile is Windows CardFile on steroids. Unlike CardFile, you can insert hyperlinks between cards, apparently, which means that the problem of double data entry explained above is somewhat ameliorated. (I say “apparently” because, so far, I haven’t been able to get it to work! There needs to be an example of the instruction required to make this happen.)
You can insert pictures, as shown here:
AZZCardfile screenshot, by Terry Freedman. Unlike CardFile, this program lets you insert sophisticated graphics.
You can also create links to websites, and do a host of other things. One especially handy option is to export the carts into a Rich Text File, making it wordprocessor-ready:
AZZCardfile screenshot, by Terry Freedman. Cards export to RTF format can be worked on in your word processor.
There is a host of importing and exporting options, most of which I don’t like very much, because the results I obtained were not what I was expecting, and importing from a large txt file caused the program to crash. However, the RTF export option is great, because as you can tell from the screenshot above, the formatting is retained.
While it’s not as feature-rich or sophisticated as Scrivener, it’s much faster to grasp — and it’s free. It’s not the most sophisticated-looking program either, but come on! I’ve started an index file for a blogging course I’m running. I’m considering keeping an index file of the books I read too, with brief notes. We’ll see.
To explore this program a bit further, and to download it along with some sample files, go to AZZCardfile.
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