****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I ordered the first one for work, and have just ordered a second for home.If you're not familiar with the concept of an "Engineering Notebook," it's a hardcover bound notebook with grid-ruled pages designed so that an engineer developing a new (and possibly patentable) product can record lab notes, calculations, etc. in a manner that both provides an organized permanent record of his/her work and a legal record which can be included as documentation with a patent application or submitted to a court as verifiable evidence of the time and nature of the work. Accordingly, each page has a date field along with a field for the engineer's own signature as well as a "Disclosed to and understood by" field for the signature of someone with the credentials to verify the authenticity of the work. There are also Title and Project fields to help uniquely identify the work.What makes this type of notebook so useful not just for formal engineering development work but for home projects, craft and hobby work or any other activity where you want to keep a detailed record, is that each page has in the upper left corner a "Continued from page ___" field and in the lower right corner a "Continued to ____" field. This lets you keep records for multiple projects on successive pages without having to "pre-format" the notebook so that each project is in a contiguous section and hope that you allocated enough pages for it. On each page for a given project, you simply note on what page you left off and on what page you continue. To help keep track, the Table of Contents has a record for each page with fields to record the subject of the page and the date on which it was filled. The fact that each page is pre-numbered means that pages cannot be removed without it being obvious that something is missing.For example, if you were working with a contractor on a home improvement job, you could enter detailed statements of work, price estimates, promised delivery dates, etc. Both you and the contractor would sign and date each page. While I am not an attorney, I have to believe that such documentation would carry weight in a courtroom in the unfortunate event of a dispute.Certainly you could buy a dime-store notebook and laboriously create all the fields yourself by hand, but this notebook is designed to be a permanent archival record and so is of high-quality bound construction. In addition, being designed as a laboratory notebook, it lays out and stays flat on a table or workbench. Try that with your two-dollar "essay notebook" from your local discount retailer.In summary, if you have the need to make a comprehensive, detailed and permanent record of your efforts whether for work or pleasure, you will find this notebook to be a worthwhile investment.
