The Tools menu
A set of useful features for the application are provided under the Tools menu, pictured in Figure E.

FIGURE E

The Tools menu has a number of useful features for the application.

The Fill Series feature, pictured in Figure F, helps with the entering of a series of data on the small screen.

FIGURE F

The Fill Series feature helps with the entering of a series of data on the small screen

The Import Sheet and Export Sheet features are also useful and work well. The Import Sheet option brings up the screen pictured in Figure G.

FIGURE G

The Import Sheet option brings up a screen with the contents of your Memo Pad.

The Import Sheet screen lists the contents of your Memo Pad and allows you to import these as either tab delimited or comma delimited files. Conversely, the Export Sheet option permits the export of spreadsheets in the same format. These features also factor into the use of TinySheet Conduit, which I'll discuss later.

My experiences
As you might expect, larger workbooks and workbooks with extensive calculation required perform slower than smaller sheets of predominately text and numbers. The application provides a useful method of carrying larger and calculating more intense sheets in a small package, however you probably won't want to do large amounts of manipulation and navigation in a larger workbook due to slow operation.

If you wish to use the application with an existing spreadsheet that does a large amount of calculation, I'd recommend you try it using the 30-day free trial.

I imported several types of sheets and data sets to test it. Importing a somewhat larger (146K on the desktop), multiple sheet (eight sheet), workbook consisting of only data (i.e., no formulas) and border formats, I found it did a good job of importing the workbook and kept the column widths comparable to the Excel version. The borders were removed, but this was expected. Navigation speed was an issue as discussed above.

I also imported a very large (approximately 36,000 cell, 750K on the desktop) spreadsheet. This did take a bit of time to synchronize! The Palm application loaded it fine, and it was usable. However, this size file is simply too large to comfortably work with on the Palm device with this application. On the other hand, it would be preferable to carrying the data on a laptop or on paper if only needed for limited reference.

I used the import feature to import data from existing memos in the Memo Pad area, and this functioned very well. These smaller single-sheet workbooks were quick to navigate around.

A spreadsheet that did extensive calculations between the cells was so slow in calculation as to be unusable. Less intensive calculation sheets did work well, however.

Finally, I imported a 61K data file as a CSV. Navigation of the file was relatively quick for the size, considering the hardware.

TinySheet Manager
The TinySheet Manager is the desktop application/conduit used to synchronize the data files to Excel and transfer the files to the Palm device. The application is straightforward and essentially consists of adding the workbooks or data files to a list. One thing to note is the HTML import feature only works with HTML tables, but I found it does do a good job of stripping the designated URL down to the tables, extracting them, and synchronizing the tables to the Palm-side TinySheet application. One weakness with the HTML import feature is that it won't permit importation of a saved HTML file. This is a feature that would be very useful. Perhaps it'll be included in a future release. The obvious workaround is to import the HTML file into Excel and then synchronize the spreadsheet.