PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Spreadsheet Software

Many a jaded computer user becomes a PalmPilot convert only when they first see a Palm spreadsheet, complete with pie charts. “If that little box can do Excel,” they reluctantly conclude, “I guess it really can do anything.”

You’ll have to learn a few tricks for scrolling on the tiny Palm screen. But if you want to view your Excel files while on the airplane, or perform some what-if analyses on the restaurant table before dessert, the programs described here won’t let you down.

Quicksheet

Like Palm databases, Palm spreadsheets range from fully featured (but slower, bigger, and more expensive) to simple (but quicker, smaller, and inexpensive). In the former category is Quicksheet, the 800-pound (or 149K) gorilla of Palm spreadsheets (see Figure 12.9). Your worksheets can be up to 996 by 254 cells in size, although the program bogs down dramatically if more than about 500 cells are occupied. The program offers style sheets, three cell-justification choices, password protection, cell linking across multiple sheets, search-and-replace, draggable column widths — and 38 number, currency, logical, and time functions, from AVEDEV to YEAR. A charting module is even available at extra cost from the same designers (http://www.cesinc.com).

Perhaps most useful of all, however, is the program’s synergy with Microsoft Excel. Thanks to a Quicksheet add-in, you can open and save Quicksheet files directly from within Excel for Windows (or, in mid-1999, Macintosh). Most formulas ...