• $30

• Good formatting abilities
• Hi-Res Support
• Strong Excel Support

• No Macintosh conduit
• No way to print directly from handheld

Design:
Cost/Benefit:
Coolness:
Overall:

TinySheet 4
The main TinySheet application has the standard spreadsheet format, of course. There's a grid of cells labeled with numbers and letters. iambic has gone out of its way to make this screen look as much like Microsoft Excel as possible, even more than the other Palm spreadsheets do. There's an area at the top of the screen where the values for the cells are input, scroll bars at the right and bottom, and even the small tabs to switch between sheets of the same workbook. Across the bottom of the screen are a series of icons for performing functions like Cut, paste, coloring the font, and more. About the biggest difference between TinySheet and Excel is that these icons are at the bottom rather than the top. If you are accustomed to working in Excel all the time, this is very convenient.

TinySheet has some fairly extensive formatting abilities. It has four different font sizes and you can change the foreground text color and background color for any cell. There are several options for displaying dates and times. Of course, you can select the number of decimal places, currency, the thousands separator and other options. You can control the borders for each side and top and bottom for each cell. Naturally, you can group cells together and apply formats to the groups so you don't have to spend hours formatting but it's nice that you can have such fine control of individual cells.

Naturally, you don't just want to display data with a spreadsheet, you also need to perform arithmatic functions on it. TinySheet has 113 built-in functions. This includes everything from the ultra-basic SUM to statistical, financial, and logical functions. I'm not going to list all 113; I'll just say that unless the function you want is particularly obscure, TinySheet probably has it.

As an example of some of what is possible, when testing the app, I wrote a checkbook register to test some of the functions. This included using an IF statement to check to see of each entry had been checked off as being credited to my account so I had not just a current total but the total that my bank knows about, too. Not an amazing spreadsheet but it still takes the place of the third-party check-register app I had been using.

Hi Resolution
One of the chief advantages of having your spreadsheet on a handheld also leads to one of its chief disadvantages. Handhelds are all about portability. In order to be portable, a handheld needs to be small. This leads to small screens that make it difficult to work with large spreadsheets, especially when they get both long and wide.

Fortunately, TinySheet has built-in support for the hi-res screen on the Sony N series. This means that these handhelds can display four times as much data as a unit with a 160 by 160 screen. Be sure to click on the image at right to see how much can be packed into an N series screen. Though as you can see, the hi-res screen still can't completely overcome the smallness issue: the font needs to be small in order to get the maximum amount of text.

This is so useful that I'm tempted to say that if you mostly use your handheld as a portable spreadsheet machine, an upgrade to a Sony N series would be worth it.

As long as I'm on the subject of Sony, I ought to mention that there's also support for the Jog Dial.

TinyChart
While little numbers in long columns have their uses, nothing makes an impact like a chart or graph. iambic has created a powerful charting tool in TinyChart. It offers six types of graphs, like line, column, pie, etc. Plus, each of these has subtypes and 3D versions.

Again, iambic has tried to make this as Excel-like as possible. Just select a range of values, choose 'Chart' from a drop down menu, go through a short wizard to pick the type and subtype, and your chart gets created. You can even assign a chart to a table cell. This puts a small graphic in the cell which, when clicked on, makes the chart appear.

Syncing with Excel
The TinySheet Conduit lets you synchronize spreadsheets between TinySheet on your handheld and Excel on your Windows PC automatically. I'm sad to say, there's no Macintosh conduit. Just add the spreadsheet to the TinySheet Desktop Manager or create a new sheet on the handheld and any changes on either platform will be synchronized during HotSync. It works with Excel 97 and higher .

I almost forgot to mention, the charts created with TinyChart also get synchronized with the charts in Excel.

Speed
One of the complaints about previous versions of TinyChart is they were kind of slow. iambic worked very hard to fix this. The development team was able increase synchronization speed with Excel, the speed handling formulas or cutting and pasting from cells, and the general speed of the program overall.

They have made some serious improvements in scrolling speed. If you have a really huge spreadsheet, you can scroll close to 400 rows down in five seconds.

Conclusion
I have to admit, the last time I was a serious Excel user was the mid-90s when it got me through two quarters of accounting and my Senior Project. TinySheet is quite similar to the version of Excel I was using then. This shouldn't surprise me much; my handheld now is about as powerful as the computer I was using then.

So I have to say, iambic has done a great job of translating Excel into a Palm version. It is easy to use, especially if you are familiar with Excel, and quite powerful.