NoteTab Pro 5.1 review

The Frugal Tech hates bulky software. Why? Because bulky software tends to drive up the cost of development, which gets passed to consumers (that would be you and me). And bulky software generally requires you to have a more expensive system than you might have otherwise bought, so you can run the bulky software. For sure, bulky software is, generally, easier software to use, (or seems to be) with pull down menus and a smart graphical user interface. There appears to be an option to this in a very fun, efficient and user friendly program called Note Tab Pro by Fookes Software.

Note Tab Pro is essentially a text editor. That’s what all word processors are and that includes Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer, Wordperfect, among others. Text editors are tools that help you put your words on paper. Over time, most text editors started to get more user friendly (a good thing) with drop down menus and GUI’s (graphical user interfaces). But then started getting very bulky. The reason they started getting bulky is the slow inclusion of desktop publishing features into the editor. Desktop publishing is about styling and making things look right and presentable and readable. Text editing is about editing text. Both when you publish to the web the bulky software is actually a drawback. You don’t need all the nice features to do what you need to do.

That’s where Note Tab comes in. There are three versions, cheapskate (or free) Note Tab Light, Note Tab Standard (for $20), and what the Frugal Techie uses, Note Tab Pro for $30.00. We didn’t review all three flavors, just the Pro version, but you can see a nifty comparison chart at this link HERE.

What we liked about Note Tab Pro and what you might like too:

• Easy to use, we opened and got typing
• Clean creation of HTML for formatting, columns or whatever you like. We write in Note Tab Pro, cut and paste to WordPress and that’s it. No messing about with the code afterwards.
• Built in wonderful spell checker
• Unique top tab keeps multiple documents open for speedy work on them
• Amazing speed. It opens, loads and gets you going in under 10 seconds
• Does not cause our system to slow down. We have a very robust system with 1GB of RAM. MS Word and Open Office Writer sometimes slow to a crawl. Note Tab Pro always works very fast
• Unique outlining feature allows for documents within documents so you can use Note Tab Pro as a low cost project manager

We’ve only just gotten to the very basics of the package but frankly it’s a big winner and one of the most handy and most used software packages we have here! It’s well worth the $30.00 price tag and you get free upgrades, a great deal.