That's the case with Web-based calendar and contact-management services. I've used Yahoo!'s personalized news service (which creates a summary page of linked news articles in categories that I choose) for over a year now. So, when they introduced the free Yahoo! Calendar recently, I couldn't resist trying it out. When I saw that I could import my existing Palm calendar data directly, without having to re-enter information by hand, I became even more intrigued.

Why use a Web calendar?
Before launching into the specifics of using Yahoo!'s calendar, I need to address the bigger question of why someone would want to put their schedule on the Web, especially if they already own a PalmPilot. If you can access your Date Book with the press of a button or the tap of your stylus, what good is it to store that information on an Internet server hundreds or thousands of miles away? I've come up with the following short list of solutions (and would love to hear from readers who have found other uses):

• In the Palm Desktop software, you can create a new user account that acts as a central calendar for family members or officemates who don't use PalmPilots for their schedules. Stock it with important non-private dates (holidays, company meetings, group movie outings), then give everyone the user name and password to access it online at their convenience. They can also add their own group events for everyone else to see.

• For people who travel frequently, the Web can serve as a last-resort method of retrieving your information in the event that your PalmPilot or laptop gets stolen, broken, or your data becomes otherwise inaccessible. All you need to do is find a computer with Web access (for example, a client's office, a Kinko's location, or an Internet cafe). From there you can check or edit your schedule, then print the results or save them to a floppy disk.

• A Web calendar, at the very least, can serve as a great off-site backup of your Date Book data. At any time you can export the Web information into a Date Book Archive (.DBA) formatted file (more on this later).