I write about a lot of tools that make you more productive but only rarely do I find software that actually makes your PC smarter. Two of the tools in this year's productivity equation do that: ActiveWords and Anagram.  What makes Anagram such a vital tool for my system is the uncanny intelligence it brings to the everyday (and I do mean every day) task of capturing information from incoming e-mail, web pages, and office documents and making these data points actionable in Outlook.

The way this works could not be simpler. You simply select text in an e-mail message, on a web page, or in a document and press a pre-defined hot key (I use Shift+F12) to invoke Anagram's intelligent parser. It "reads" the text and generates a new Outlook data object appropriate to the content of the text you have selected. So, an e-mail signature becomes a new contact record, a meeting invitation becomes a new appointment, and so on.

In the rare event that Anagram does not guess correctly what kind of Outlook object you wanted to create (it happens so infrequently I can't even remember the last time it was wrong), you can re-scan the text you selected and have it converted into the specific object you thought you would get.

Anagram is available for a 45-day trial evaluation (yes that's right - 45 days!) and a single license costs $19.95. You can add a second license for another computer for $6.95. And Anagram can also be used with the Palm Desktop application. If you're a Palm user and an Outlook user, you can add the second application for (you guessed it) $6.95. And, if you're a Salesforce.com user, an Anagram subscription version is available that supports that SFA application.

A version of Anagram for ACT! is currently in beta testing.

I process so many e-mails and schedule so many meetings that I would be lost without this tool. Think about how long it takes you to transfer a new contact's information from their e-mail signature into a new Outlook (or Palm) contact record and do the multiplication. You'll arrive at the same conclusion I have - this is a must-have addition to your workflow.