Back when you were learning your trade, you could turn to a trusted mentor or business guru and ask "Do you think this will fly?" and expect a measured response with insight you couldn't bring to the table yourself. You don't have that luxury anymore. And there's another thing you're probably missing--a personal assistant to read all your incoming mail and articles and answer the question, "What's important in this batch?"

That makes two kinds of intelligent help that you could use, and probably can't get--at least not reliably and when you need it. And where circumstances leave a void, software developers rush in. Business Resource Software and Copernic Technologies have developed two radically different programs to provide that much-needed boost to your business savvy and productivity.

Of course, even the best expert systems can't replace a dedicated and ambitious human on your staff. But if you don't have someone who answers to that description--or one who is willing to do your thinking or reading for you--then BRC's Quick Insight and Copernic Summarizer are pretty good alternatives. First up, we'll look at Quick Insight, which lives up to at least half of its name.

Insightful but not instant

If you're considering several projects and have enough resources to back only one of them, you have to make a good decision. One-minute management skills don't cut it here--you need to consider your options carefully--and if you're not used to that, Quick Insight is a good place to turn. Quick Insight is the software equivalent of a business consultant--in more ways than one. It analyzes your business plans and market based on information you provide, and it comes up with a reasoned report based on your input. In that respect, it does for $130 what a suit-for-hire does for twice that much per hour.

But it works like a business consultant in other ways. Quick Insight requires a lot more of you than you initially considered. It asks you a lot of questions and requires you to weigh your answers carefully. There are around 60 factors that the program considers crucial to a project's success, and you can bet that the business gurus behind the project (Michael Porter and Philip Kotler) are going to want input on each of them. The process of entering these factors (and gauging how well your plan measures on a sliding scale) can take a couple of hours--maybe more if you're not used to thinking deeply about the market you're in and the offerings you're putting into it. This is no small undertaking--a bit of a downer in the instant-gratification world. And, sad to say, a lot of the questions it asks are couched in impenetrable MBA jargon--though to the program's credit, it does highlight many technical terms so you can click on them for a thorough definition.

Once you complete the input stage, the real work begins. Quick Insight doesn't just kick up a Magic-8-Ball phrase to give your plans a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It evaluates the risk, competition, and prospects associated with your projects, weighing and making recommendations on such issues as how you should price and promote your new product or service. There are more than 35 analytical charts in Quick Insight, which add even more time and effort to analyzing your plan.

I found some of the recommendations baffling, so I followed the program's analysis back to learn what factors contributed to the conclusion. And sure enough, the confusion turned out to be the result of a poorly considered answer or a blind spot in my own business analysis--a lesson I'd rather learn at the expense of $130 and a couple of hours with a program than as a result of a failed new product launch.

Using Quick Insight brings to mind an old Tom Lehrer quote: "Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends upon what you put into it." When I took time to consider every question carefully, weighing whether to move the slider to a 3 or a 4 rating, I gained more insight into my own business ideas by the very act of thinking about the market I was launching them into-and the resulting report was much more useful. But if you dash through the process, you'll get a corresponding dose of garbage out. Even in this worst-case scenario, however, the results will be well-constructed garbage with some well-considered insights.

Summary dismissal

Extracting keywords and producing summaries is dull work--just ask a professional indexer at a large publishing house. But it's the kind of automaton mode that many of us slip into when we're reading e-mail, Web pages, and document files, looking for information we can use. Copernic Summarizer does this automatically, reducing e-mails and proposals that rival the word count of a Russian novel to the few key points the writer hides in a barrage of verbiage.

Copernic Summarizer's linguistic-analysis tools extract key concepts and boil large documents down to two columns, one with a list of key words and another with short paragraphs condensed from the document. It can handle English, French, German, and Spanish prose from Web pages, Microsoft Office documents, and Outlook e-mail messages direct in the application. It also can form a right-click menu in Explorer. And if the text you're interested in summarizing isn't in a supported format, you can copy it to the Windows Clipboard and have the software read it there.

Installing Copernic Summarizer inserts an item in the Tools menus of Office applications and puts a button on Internet Explorer's menu bar. When you come across too many words in a Web page, e-mail, or document, you load the program and it gets to work on the open document or page. The program will ignore irrelevant elements on Web pages (such as navigation elements down the sides or at the tops of pages), focusing on the content. The result comes up after a few seconds (more for really long documents)--a column of key concepts and a few paragraphs of summary, taken from the larger page and put in a bullet-point list.

In some cases, Copernic Summarizer gloms onto irrelevancies--in which case, you can right-click on the key word or paragraph and select Delete to take it out of your summary. In other documents, Copernic Summarizer is a little overzealous in its summaries, leaving out key points you want to see. In this case, you can adjust the length of the summary by dragging a little slider tool labeled Summary Length to the right. This increases the number of key concepts Summarizer looks for, and widens the scope of the paragraphs it includes in its summary.

And the program is good for more than on-the-fly reading. It can save summaries in RTF, TXT, or HTML format, and can even put them directly into the body of an e-mail message ready to send from your default e-mail software. These export options make it a useful tool for professional indexers and people who want to broadcast concise information to their workgroup.

But while Copernic Summarizer does a good job overall, it's clearly not perfect. While it got the gist of most of the news stories, press releases, and collaborative edit documents I fed it in my field test of the program, it omitted the company names from some documents, and ignored important information from others. And because the program takes a little time to do its work, and sometimes needs to be tweaked to include all the information I was looking for, it's not clear whether it actually saved any time. Certainly, I spent less time reading through large blocks of text, but I could easily have gobbled up those minutes by fiddling around with the software.

That said, for anyone who needs to index or summarize documents to distribute among colleagues or clients, Copernic Summarizer does a great job of saving labor. And it also works wonders for the text-weary eyes of researchers.

Contributing Editor Matt Lake has racked up experience in three major corporations and one branch of the government. He currently operates RegSelect.com and helps nonprofit organizations develop a Web presence.