The Palm OS spreadsheet market has recently become a twoman show(imho) – Dataviz against Mobisystems, with Cesinc beeing on the way out(imho). Each of these suites can do loads of things – but they are incredibly heavy filesize-wise.and most of the included features(native file support) aren’t useful for WristPDA users. MiniCalc is not a doitall product – it focusses on the gist of Excel and thus is small and fast…
When starting MiniCalc, one immediately sees that the developer has thought about ease of use – you can either look at a list of books, or look at the individual sheets:
After opening a sheet, the good impression continues. A variety of zoom levels allow you to customize your view:
The editing screen itself is full of gadgets that help navigate/enter data. Tapping the gadgets requires a bit of dexterity-but the useful features pay out. For example, you get a popover numeric keyboard, a text box that shows more field contents and a variety of scroll modes:
The spreadsheet itself fared well in my test. All necessary functions are there, the calculations work fast and well. Formatting output was no problem either – the calculation shown below will be too familiar to Palm OS developers:
MiniCalc contains an optional chart module that produces acceptable charts on the go:
MiniCalc is totally modular – you can remove unneeded functions to save space(!!!):
This review covered MiniCalc version 7.2.2 on an Abacus AU5008 WristPda. Fully installed, the program takes up about 300k, but can be slimmed down. The products homepage is:
http://www.solutionsinhand.com/
MiniCalc contains a desktop conduit as well – however, this review focusses on the handheld component. A 15day demo version is available though – so try it out before buying!
Overall, SolutionsInHand did a great job with MiniCalc. The program is very small but still flexible enough for almost every Excel task. If you need a spreadsheet for your WristPDA and can miss out on native file support, this could be your ideal app!
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Have you looked at Additon4Palm? I know it’s been a while since it’s been updated, but it works. I’m playing with it at this moment, and I suspect it might actually work also on a wristpda. It also works in Mac and Windows, and deals with wk1 files, rather than CVS, a plus in my book.
-Jon
I liked the review and I downloaded a trial MiniCalc onto my AU5005. I would like to use it for a lot of list data but I cannot get it to word wrap. Yup, I thought I followed the directions. Did MiniCalc word wrap for you? If so, what did you do?
Thanks again for the review.
Richard