Project management gurus or anyone doing event planning on any scale will appreciate the program's ability to schedule items and indicate how close they are to completion.

An intriguing feature of BrainForest is its double sort abilities. You can sort your tree by one or two criteria, including percent done, priority, completion date, etc. The Palm version of the software also lets you sort individual branches, in addition to entire trees. These sorts often reveal patterns you might otherwise miss.

BrainForest Professional features a number of export formats including memopad text, text, CSV, ToDo, and HTML. A feature of BrainForest Professional not available in the Mobile Edition is a Time Line view of a project. This view provides a graphic representation of due dates in a variety of time formats, including week, month, two months, six months, or year.

Documentation
Aportis gets high marks for its documentation. A useful tutorial takes you through the program basics but urges you to explore the program in greater depth. It is both extensive and useful. Kudos are in order for a really nicely produced Acrobat document. Far too many software manufacturers produce ugly PDF files, but Aportis has taken the time to create a useful help document complete with bookmarks, hyperlinks to point the user to the section, and the judicious use of color.

[We're not big fans of Acrobat here at PalmPower, so we always like to see HTML versions of manuals. We recommend that Aportis also make available a Web-based, non-PDF version of the BrainForest manual. -- DG]

Limitations
I found a lot to like in this version and very little to complain about. Although I find BrainForest Professional to be a great preliminary organizing tool for writing, the 256-character limit on any individual branch (a limit imposed by the Palm operating system) frustrates me. On a number of occasions I have found myself in the middle of a sentence, with more to say, but unable to enter any text until I figured out I needed to start a new branch or leaf. Also missing for me in the export to HTML plug-in is the ability to export URLs and email addresses as clickable links in an HTML document.

BrainForest is a surprisingly adept tool for the creation of PowerPoint presentations. I can work on a presentation on my Palm unit or on the desktop and then export it as a text file. This then gets imported into PowerPoint. Then all I need to do is add a background and perhaps some transitions and I'm ready to present.