By Kieran, Slate & Serif
A hyperlinked PDF can get you from January to Thursday in a tap. That's useful navigation. It doesn't, by itself, make the appointment you wrote on Thursday part of the appointment you also wrote on the weekly spread.
We built Slate & Serif around typed entries in designed planner pages. If you want the planner to handle dates and calculations too, it's the one I'd recommend. The two traces below show the difference, and you can repeat them with any planner you're considering.
What this comparison covers
"PDF planner" here means a common setup: a static planner file, opened in an annotation app, where you write or type on the pages. Some fillable PDFs and annotation apps add calculations or other tools. If yours does, run the traces anyway and see what changes.
Trace 1: an appointment moves
A fictional physio appointment is booked for Tuesday at 8:30. It's written down in the three places you'd look: Tuesday's daily page, the weekly spread and the monthly calendar. Then the clinic moves it to Thursday at 5:15.
In the PDF workflow, you have three annotations to change. Find Tuesday's page and remove it. Write it on Thursday. Do the same on the weekly spread, then the month. Miss one, and next week the month still says Tuesday. A hyperlink gets you to each page faster, but it's still three edits.
In Slate & Serif, the appointment is one event. Change its date and time in a single edit, and Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Calendar all show Thursday at 5:15. The exercises the physio gave you stay in a notebook, untouched, because notes don't need to move with the date. A to-do like "book the follow-up" works the same way across Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Plan task list.
Trace 2: a payment comes out
The same week, a fictional 48 gym membership payment comes out.
In the PDF workflow, you write 48 in the budget grid. Then you add up the category, subtract it from what's left and redo the sum when the next expense arrives. The page keeps your numbers; the arithmetic happens on your phone's calculator or in your head.
In Slate & Serif, you add one entry in the Expense Tracker: date, category, description and amount. Monthly Finance adds it to the category's actual. "Left to spend" works from the recorded actuals, while "Left to budget" stays a planning figure, so you can see both the plan and what has happened. There's no bank feed: you type the 48, and the planner does the sums.
What the traces tell you
In both traces the same work moved from you to the software. That's the case for a planner app over a static planner file: not that the pages look more organized, but that keeping them accurate takes fewer steps. Copying one appointment onto three pages is upkeep, not planning.
PDFs do have a real strength, and it's how they look. Planner apps can feel clinical and interchangeable. That was one of the frustrations behind Slate & Serif. That's why Slate & Serif Premium lets you choose themes, covers, bindings, paper and backgrounds, style the text you add, and use your own photos and stickers. Core keeps the default look, and both plans include the planning and finance pages.
One event and one completed to-do shown on Daily and Weekly. Fictional entries from our Help guide; events also appear on the Monthly Calendar, and to-dos in the Monthly Plan task list.
What you give up, and what you keep
Handwriting. Slate & Serif is typed. If writing freehand across a page is the point for you, a PDF in an annotation app does that and we don't.
Your archive. Slate & Serif doesn't import a planner PDF or its annotations. Keep your old files where they are and move only upcoming plans.
Outside calendars. Google and Microsoft calendar connections and private browser-notification previews aren't available yet. The connections in Trace 1 are inside Slate & Serif.
Run the traces yourself
Open the Premium sample on a laptop or desktop. It needs no account or card, and it resets after its displayed 24-hour period, so use made-up entries. Add an appointment, move it, and count the edits. Then record a made-up payment and watch the totals.
Add Slate & Serif as a preferred source on Google. It's a personal setting that only affects what Google shows you.