Quicksheet: Spreadsheets on Your Palm

From PC to Palm and Back Again

When you open a workbook on your Palm, you'll find the screen divided into three areas. At the top is the workbook name, a pop-up menu for working with sheets and the clipboard, and arrows that let you switch between sheets. In the middle is the worksheet, which takes up about 75 percent of the screen. On the worksheet you'll find cells organized in lettered columns and numbered rows. You create and edit cell contents at the bottom of the screen; a pop-up list in that area lets you choose any of the 60 built-in functions for use in formulas, such as AVG, HLOOKUP (horizontal lookup in a table or on an array of values), and FV (future value based on constant, periodic payments). To indicate cell ranges, you can select an anchor cell and drag from it, or you can type ranges as you would in Excel, as in =AVG(F4:F10).

You can navigate around the worksheet in many ways: tapping the directional arrows on the right side of the Palm screen, using the stylus to tap and drag in any direction, choosing a command from the Page menu, entering a command with Graffiti (B for the bottom of the worksheet, for example), or pressing buttons on the Palm. You can resize the first 40 columns of any worksheet by dragging the dividing line between columns.

Version 5 has several added capabilities. Included bar-code reader support lets you scan bar-code data into cells. You can synchronize a worksheet on your PC among multiple users, as well as synchronize worksheets with multiple PCs. You can also e-mail your Quicksheet files as attachments with MultiMail Pro (a separate program sold by Actual Software).

I created a simple test worksheet to track business mileage. I put in numbers to indicate the miles at the start and finish of each trip, and then had Quicksheet Autosum them. Once I did that, I multiplied the totals by 33 cents per mile. Quicksheet was perfect for that type of function. I also synced it with my PC with no problems.

Quicksheet on Your Desktop

In addition, Quicksheet includes a desktop application that you can use to manage Quicksheet files on your PC. When you open a workbook in Quicksheet Desktop, Excel automatically launches. On your desktop, you can also create or rename categories and convert existing Excel files to Quicksheet format by dragging and dropping.

The package also comes with Quickchart 1.0, a Palm application to create graphs and charts from Quicksheet worksheets. To create a chart, you enter the Chart function in a Quicksheet cell, specify a range, and then double-click the cell. Quickchart then allows you to set the desired chart options (such as chart type, labels, legend, and whether the data is in rows or columns). Supported chart types include line, bar, stacked bar, scatterplot, pie, and stock (high-low-close). Charts can be displayed in gray-scale or with black-and-white patterns. During my testing, Quickchart crashed, but no hard reset was required and I lost no data.

Whether you want to add data to your Excel worksheets or you just want view a few critical worksheets while you're away from your desk, Quicksheet 5 is a great solution.