At the time, there weren't any other financial calculators available for the PalmPilot, so we (at Infinity Softworks) set out to write our own: FCPlus (and later FCPlus Professional). Now, of course, there are many special-purpose calculators available. A quick search of a Palm software archive (like Ray's Software archive at http://www.palmcentral.com) will likely yield over a hundred choices. Plus, there are now other fine commercial products like SynCalc from Synergy Solutions.

In this article, we'll help you understand how you can use your Palm device to do financial planning. Because my company wrote the FCPlus products, I'll obviously be using them in my examples. But you can use pretty much any calculator with good financial functions to do the same thing.

Functionality with FCPlus Professional
Before we talk about how to perform your own financial calculations, you need to know a little about the calculators themselves. We have two versions of the product. One is FCPlus (at $19.99) and the other is FCPlus Professional (at $39.99). While both work quite well, the Professional version offers more advanced features for the finance professional. We've included a link to a product comparison table in the Product Availability section at the end of this article. Throughout this article, we'll be talking about FCPlus Professional, but you can do many of the same functions with the less expensive FCPlus product.

FCPlus Professional is split into two sections. The main screen performs general mathematical calculations while the worksheets perform financial, business and statistical calculations.

As shown in Figure A, the main calculator allows the user to work in either standard or RPN input modes, performing many advanced calculations including power, square root, natural log, and exponential.

FIGURE A

Here you can see FCPlus Professional's Main Screen, Time Value of Money worksheet and Calculation Log.