I still have just about every album and movie I've ever purchased -- some of them on several different types of media. Now that there are DVDs, I'm going to have to replace certain movies that I have watched to death on videotape. As Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, "Aww man, I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again." Keeping track of all these various and sundry items is kind of a big task.

I used to have them all in a spreadsheet on my desktop computer, but lugging my computer around was a little hard to do -- and the extension cord just wasn't long enough.

Now, with Quicksheet from Cutting Edge, I've stopped worrying about that extension cord. Quicksheet, shown in Figure A, is a surprisingly full-featured spreadsheet program that runs on the Palm organizer. The spreadsheet is best suited for small to medium sized files, but you'd be surprised at what you can fit onto the Palm organizer (the maximum is 996 rows by 254 columns). Though Cutting Edge recommends spreadsheets around 500 cells or less, and for my purposes, that works really well.

FIGURE A

Cutting Edge has managed to get an entire spreadsheet program to run in your Palm organizer.

A spreadsheet on a Palm device?
What can you use a spreadsheet for? Well, just about anything that needs to organize data. For example, before other obvious applications for checkbooks were released, I had my checking account records set up in a spreadsheet with fields that calculated what my balance was, the amount that should be reflected on my statement, fields for name, date, number, category, etc. I also kept track of my addresses in a spreadsheet and my trusty media list (which still exists through the many upgrades and platforms of database applications that I have had over the years).

I've seen people use a spreadsheet program as a sort of a visual database to keep track of inventory, mortgage payments, stock information and prices -- and one person, who was just plain old masochistic, wrote letters in a spreadsheet. (the letters looked funny in the end, but they were fine).

Getting into Quicksheet
Quicksheet is a pretty versatile little application for the Palm computer and your options are fairly extensive for things you can create.