Keep a journal on the move with Red Notebook Portable

There are some writing jobs that aren't best left to Word, Open Office or Libre Office. One of these is keeping a journal, whether it's a personal diary or a reference of useful information found online. This is the portable version of Red Notebook, ideal for keeping your references with you at all times on a USB key.

Installation can be done in one of two ways. The download can be run by itself to install Red Notebook in a folder, either on the computer on some kind of external storage. Alternatively it can be installed into the Portable Apps launcher through that program. The normal Windows version can be found here.

Creating a new entry in a journal is also simple. Click on a date in the calendar to start with a clean sheet in the main part of the screen.

Entries can't be formatted in the way that you can in Word; instead titles can be marked by using = symbols on either side of the words.

Red Notebook keeps track of key words and tags and shows them in the tag pane and the word cloud. This makes it easy to find common words. It is possible to exclude words from these tools.

The one thing we think is missing from this app is some way of password-protecting journals, especially as the potential for losing the journal is greater when it is kept on a USB key.