Your data are stored inside an industry-standard Microsoft SQL Server CE database, which is 128 bit encrypted, when you choose to encrypt it by setting a password. SQL CE is the latest and most sophisticated database engine from Microsoft, which was originally developed for portable devices and is only available for a few years for desktop computers. Older programs are mostly using Access databases. Super Diary does not contain any viruses, maliciouse code or loopholes; I guarantee for it with my name and my good reputation.

Good news for you: you can. I have implemented an import function, which can bring all your old entries into the new database. Even your statistics data (if any) are imported and you will find them in the new statistics module. You can access the import dialog with "Tools -> Import from XML" from the main menu.

Yes, you can use as many database files as you need and switch between them "on the fly" very quickly and easily. The program contains functions for moving, copying and renaming database files and also for setting new passwords or removing the password. There is an integrated auto-backup tool, so you do not have to make backups manually.

• "Hide instead of Exit": When you click the X-Button on the top right corner of the window, the program hides in the system tray instead of quitting.
• "Reset Calendar Control": When enabled (default) the month calendar in the upper left corner is reset to the current date, when you switch to a different module.
• "Auto Start": When enabled, the program will launch with Windows automatically. Check "Hide on Startup" to hide the program in the system tray right after launching.
• "Default Entry": Here you can select what a new document should look like, for the Journal and the Notes module separately. It can be a blank page (A4 or US Letter format) or a template (a previously imported or created document). For using templates, see the Diary section -> "What are templates?".
• "Week Start": This setting affects the month calendar in the interface and the week calendar.
• "Time Format": This setting affects the alarm clock settings and the week calendar.
• "Auto-Save every...": Select the time interval, in which your entries will be saved automatically. Saving is usually not required, but in case of a crash your changes to a document would otherwise not be saved.
• "Auto-Backup every...": Select the interval of database backups, which will be created on program start. The backups will be saved to the selected backup folder - they contain the full file name and a date suffix. You can select, how many backups should be saved - the older ones are deleted.
• "Birthday Reminder": You will get a reminder popup when a contact in your address book is celebrating his or her birthday.
• "Hotkeys": You can select a system-wide hotkey for hiding and showing the program window here. Place the cursor in the text field and enter the hotkey (for instance Ctrl + Shift + Numpad1). To remove a hotkey, press "Del" inside the text field.

You can insert new documents into the journal by choosing File -> New Entry, by clicking the "New" button below the tree view or by pressing Ctrl + N. For a date where there are no entries yet, a new day folder is created. Note that you have two tabs in the tree view: "Month" and "Folder". In both views you can move your entries to different folders. In the folder view you can also create new folders and subfolders. Folders can also be renamed and deleted. When you delete a folder, the contents (if any) are moved to the root folder - they are not deleted.

You don't have to. Your entries are saved automatically when you switch to a different tab,select a new entry, when you leave the current module or close the program. You can also set an auto-save interval in the settings.

Templates are documents that you have saved with File -> Save as Templates. They are stored in a separate database table and you can use them later when starting a new document (by File -> Load Template). In the settings dialog (Tools -> Settings) you can also choose templates as your default pages when you create new entries. By default an empty page with A4 or US Letter format is inserted.

The tabs enable you to open as many files as you like at the same time and switch between them quickly. To open a document in the current tab, just click on the document icon in the treeview. To open a document in a new tab, first click the small empty tab (outer right), so the current document is duplicated there. Then click the icon for the document you wish to open in the new tab. You can drag tabs to a new location and you can remove tabs with the context menu (right click on a tab). Open tabs are saved and restored on a later session. When you have a document open in two or more tabs, you can work on the document in different sections at the same time!

You can define up to 10 style sheets, that you can later apply to any paragraph easily. You find the button for the style sheets access on the left side of the font selector. Styles contain font name, size, style, color and others. A few styles are already defined in the list, but you can edit them at will. To edit new or current styles, click the "Edit Style Sheets" item on the bottom of the list. Only styles that are checked in the table are displayed in the list. To apply a style to a current paragraph, just select the style from the list. You can also transfer styles by clicking the brush tool and marking the block of text you want to apply the current style to.

You can search for a specific word within all entries by selecting Edit -> Find and Replace -> Find in Files. An index is created automatically, so you can find entries very quickly, even when you have a lot of entries. Within a file you can search with Ctrl + F (Edit -> Find and Replace -> Quick Find), where you can select some options. To find the next occurrence, press F3.

You will find out most of the things by yourself - I tried to make the program work like common text processors. Here are a few things that are not documented elsewhere: Entered URLs (web addresses) are automatically transformed into a clickable address, when they start with "www" or "http". You can trag images into the editor window (one or several). Images are resized to fit the editor window, when they are too big. Images are stored in documents in JPEG format. Use the table builder to create tables. Right-click a table to edit its properties. Ctrl + T selects the next tab, if you have more than one open. Click the calendar background, to hide or show it, getting more space for your tree view when you are in editor mode.

You don't have to. Entries are saved automatically when you enter and edit them.

Right-click the picture box and select an image from your hard drive. It is automatically resized to fit the box and will be saved in the same database as all your other data.

Yes, in every module of Super Diary you can import data. In the contacts module you can import CSV (comma separated value) and VCF (visiting card format) files. These can be exported from many programs. CSV files are basically text files with a defined separator - you can export such files from an Excel table.

You don't have to. Entries are saved automatically when you enter or edit them.

Left-click in the week view, drag the mouse downwards to create a marked section, right-click and choose "New": a new appointment is created with a default text. Click the new appointment to edit the text, press "Esc" to end editing.

You can have recurrent appointments for every week, every month, every 3 months etc. Right-click an appointment and change "One time..." to "Every day", "Every week" etc. A new chain of appointments is created. When you edit one of them (time, text, color), all the others are affected as well. When you create a new appointment chain or when you open the calendar module, appointments will be inserted for one year in advance.

To edit the text: double-click the entry or select "Edit Text" from the context menu. Press "Esc" to end editing.

Select the appointment and press "Del" or choose "Delete" from the context menu. You can delete multiple entries with the search function: click "Find" and leave the text field empty.

Select "Alert" from the context menu of an appointment and you will get a reminder popup to the time of the appointment.

You don't have to. Entries are saved automatically when you enter or edit them.

Click "New" (or press Ctrl + N) and enter a title for your login. Visit the login site and drag the url from the browser address bar to the address bar of the login page (or use copy and paste). Click the "Page Analysis" button and wait for a few seconds. The now showing popup displays a representation of the form(s) found on the page and its relevant fields. Usually the intelligent logic of the program will select the correct form and fields and you can just press OK. If login does not work later, you might have to make adjustments here in a new attempt. The browser needs to be restarted after an analysis. Fill in the login and password fields in the program If everything worked well, you can now press "Login" to automatically login to your site. The page is opened in the currently open tab. If the Internet Explorer is not open yet, a new instance is opened for you. Be aware that the login process can take a few seconds, so do not interrupt it too early by clicking any buttons.

No, at the moment the auto-login only works with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

When you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you have to add the site address to the list of trusted websites inside the Internet Exporer settings. Go to Extras -> Internet Options -> Security - > Trusted Sites and add the address of the page you want to control.

There are a few sites that block external programs from logging in, using very sophisticated Javascripts. The two I found so far are Facebook and AOL. You can still save the logins for these sites and open them from within the program, but auto-login will not work here.

When you log in to a website, Super Diary starts an external launcher program, that logs in to the website. After 10 seconds the external launcher is being shut down and the mouse cursor is being resetted to the center of the "Log in" button (this has technical reasons). Please wait for 10 seconds after you have clicked the "Log in" button.

Press "New" (or Ctrl + N) to enter a new income or payment. Enter the amount, click the Expense or Income button (the minus sign is assigned automatically for expenses), the title of the payment and the category. The date of the payment is the currently selected date of the calendar. Title and category can be re-used for later entries (just select them from the dropdown list) or overwrite the fields to create new names. Payments can be one-time or recurrent.

When a payment you enter is supposed to be automatically inserted in certain intervals, you have to select the interval from the drop-down-menu in the "Entry" section: "Every Week", "Every Month" etc. For the first entry in a chain of recurrent payments, you must also check the "Template" checkbox. When you edit the template later, changes will also apply the other payments in that chain. If you wish to find the template for a "Slave" payment, click the "Edit" button. When a "Template" entry is being deleted, all dependent "Slaves" will be converted into single payments. Due payments will be inserted automatically, each time you open the program.

Press the "Update" button after you have entered or edited a payment.

Connect your microphone or webcam with integrated mike to the computer and wait a few seconds until it is initialized by the driver. Click the "Reset" button in the title bar if required (this is only neccessary if the device was not plugged in, before the sound module was opened). Adjust the settings if you need to. Higher compression results in smaller files, while lower compression and better quality results in bigger files. Click the "Record" button (the one with the red dot and make your recording. If you check the "Skip Silence" checkbox, silent passages are not recorded.

Recordings are automatically saved when you hit the "Stop" button after a recording, or when you have imported a sound. You can edit the default title right after the recording or any time later. Click the button with the floppy disk icon to save the new name or date.

Yes, you can! Click the "Open" button in the toolbar and select any sound clip in WAV, MP3, WMA or OGG Vorbis format. Be aware that the file is recompressed into OGG Vorbis in any case, using the selected settings. When you select a good quality, you will not notice the difference though. OGG Vorbis is a license-free format with very good quality even with high compressions and you can later export all your clips to OGG files again, in the original quality.

Just enter the new text into the colored text fields and click "Save". To change the colors, click the palette button in the tool bar.

Press the "Save" button.

Select the entries from the table (hold the Shift or Ctrl key) and select "Edit Entries" or "Delete Entries" from the context menu.

Click the "Graph View" tab on the bottom of the table.

Open the program with "Tools -> Rip Website" from the main menu. Drag and drop (or copy and paste) the web address to the address text box and click "Start". Select the items you want to rip (Images, Links, Text), confirm or change the ripping options and press the "Start" button. When the ripping is done, you can save the image folder to your hard drive or (when you have selected links or text) insert the result into the currently open document (Journal or Notes mode has to be selected) or just copy it to the clipboard.

Unfortunately you can't. But most websites should not make any problems. There are some websites that prevent content ripping with technical restrictions. You should get a timeout alert after 10 seconds, if ripping a page does not work at all.

Select Tools -> Install on Flash Drive. Select the USB drive you want to install to. All program files and your last used database file are copied to a new folder in the selected USB drive, also a launcher tool in the root directory. You can now use Super Diary on every Windows computer without installation. On program startup, your database file(s) and the configuration file are copied to the current user's "My Documents" folder. When you exit the program, these files are copied back to the USB drive (without using absolute paths), so the next time you can use the changed files again, on the same or on another computer. All files (database(s), configuration file ("settings.xml") and temporary files will be deleted on the host computer, before the program is shutting down.

Yes, this is possible. After an installation on a USB drive, there is only the currently used database file present, but you can add or create more. When you are opening or creating new databases, these files are included in your "recently opened databases" list after you have opened them. All these files (up to 5) will be copied back to your USB drive on program shutdown and you can select them again on next program startup, even on a different computer (absolute paths will be adjusted).

There are a few small things, but they are usually not severe: You cannot use the Auto-Backup function; I disabled this function because it would not work reliably. The picture folder (first directory when you add a new picture to a document) will always be resetted to the user's "My Pictures" folder. In case of a computer crash, any existing (left over) database files, which would have been deleted from the host computer, will NOT be overwritten. So you can usually just continue working without any problems after a power-down or crash - only the very last changes might be lost. If you want to start from the last version on your USB drive though, you would have to delete or backup any database (*.sdf) files from the documents folder of the host account first.

It works basically like in the normal, hard-drive mode copy protection, which is based on the usual hardware/software identification. Since each USB drive has a unique hardware ID, it can be used to create a unique activation key, along with the license key. When the program is launched from USB, it checks for this key, to prevent casual copying to a different USB drive. During the trial period, the Flash Drive Mode will only work for one minute for demonstration purposes. This should be enough to test all functions.