Ecco Pro is a program for collecting and organising information which was available commercially from 1991-1997, and since then has been free to use and download. Although it is old, it was always in many ways at least ten years ahead of its time and many of its users have stayed loyal because they have found nothing to match its combination of intuitive power and flexibility.

Ecco combines two ways of examining and arranging information: outlines and a spreadsheet-like grid. It also had a clipboard utility, known as the "shooter", which led you send it text or other information quickly and easily from other programs.

The outliner makes it very easy to arrange information in order of importance, or so that it tells a story, and then to shift it all around as priorities change, or a different story works better.
The spreadsheet grid makes it possible to tag any item in an outline with different qualities. These can be ordinary text tags (known in Ecco as 'Checkmark folders'); but they can also be dates, numbers, telephone numbers: they can even be text notes themselves.

As a very simple example of the power of this approach, imagine a journalist collecting notes for a story. Starting in the phone book, where all her contacts are kept, she can dial them from Ecco, and type the notes for each conversation in outline form under the phone book entry. Each conversation is also added to a folder for that particular story, along with any material from the web or anywhere else that seems relevant. By opening a fresh outline containing all the quotes for the story, it is easy to shuffle them around into their most effective order. By this time, the story has practically written itself. Once it is done, all of the material has been automatically tagged, dated and sorted, so that it is possible to come back years later and see exactly who talked about what.

Lawyers and (Real) Estate Agents have found the program just as useful.

However, since it has not been developed since 1997, Ecco Pro is showing its age in some respects, and the Eccoext program is an attempt to fix some of the things that have long irritated power users.