Turn Your H/PC Into A Power Calculator

Windows CE comes with a basic calculator that is useful for simple calculations, but insufficient for more advance personal, business, and scientific needs. Fortunately, there have been a number of excellent calculator and financial programs developed by independent vendors to meet this need. This article looks at four of these programs: CoolCalc, Pocket Finance, PocketBiz, and Proficiency. Our thanks go to the reviewers for sharing their thoughts with us.

CoolCalc

Applian Software

Review by Craig Peacock

CoolCalc is powerful, easy to use and customize calculator that lets you do personal, business, or scientific calculations on the H/PC. CoolCalc has macro capability and comes with its own programming language. Even better, the program lets you customize its calculator and formula screens to create your own personal calculator.

You can move calculator buttons around, assign them to do various functions, and change the size and appearance of individual buttons. You can create and edit your own macros (sequences of calculator functions), and assign them to buttons as well. CoolCalc comes with templates to create your own formula screens, too. By pressing various on-screen buttons, you can have a business or scientific calculator, or a variety of “formula screens” to do more complex things such as Time Value of Money calculations and metric conversions.

Reminiscent of a web browser, each calculator has a Home and Back button, which means you’re never more than a tap away from the Main Menu. I liked the way the calculator screens displayed information and the fact that you could customize the function of the buttons to suit your needs. All these things, and the fact that it installs completely in less than 250k makes CoolCalc a winner in my book.

CoolCalc lets you create specialized formula screens to accomplish specific calculations. Shown above is a screen to calculate the Time Value of Money.

CoolCalc’s Main Menu lets you select a business calculator, a scientific calculator, special formulas you have configured, or the Programmers Guide.

Proficiency

MVA Software

Review By Craig Peacock

Proficiency is an RPN calculator providing business, financial, statistical, scientific, engineering and computer science functionality to H/PC users. It emulates the Hewlett-Packard HP-12C financial calculator, most of the HP-15C engineering/scientific calculator and portions of the HP-16C computer science calculator. Proficiency comes with an extensive library of pre-programmed functions, providing users with solutions to the majority of day-to-day calculation needs.

A lot of care and attention has been paid to small details often overlooked on similar products. Proficiency is easy to use, and has a comprehensive, but uncluttered display area. Proficiency’s display has been optimized for the H/PC’s small screen and come in two versions — one for H/PCs with a 480 by 240 pixel display (Casio, Compaq, LG, Hitachi, NEC, and Philips) and one for the 640 by 240 display of the Hewlett-Packard 300/320LX Palmtop PC.

As mentioned above, Proficiency is an RPN calculator. RPN, or “Reverse Polish Notation,” is a variation on a parentheses-free form mathematical logic. The other popular notation is Algebraic. To add the number’s 1 and 2 in Algebraic Notation, you press 1, then +, then 2, and finally =. To perform the same calculation on an RPN calculator you press 1, Enter, 2, and finally +. Many popular business and scientific calculators from Hewlett-Packard have used RPN. Proficiency always displays the RPN Stack, letting you see the intermediate processing.

Proficiency provides you two modes of operation - use the stylus to tap the calculator keys directly on the display, or use the H/PC’s keyboard. All functions are available either way. Tabbed pages organize functions into logical groups. You can jump between tabs as necessary to accomplish your calculations.

Proficiency comes with lots of features, is well organized, and optimized for the size of your H/PC. If you are looking for a financial product to do standard, business, or scientific calculations, you may not have to look much further than Proficiency.

Proficiency’s Conversion screen is shown above. The 480 pixel wide display on top, the 640 pixel wide display on the bottom.

Pocket BizCalc

Odyssey Computing

Review By Michael J. Posner

The calculator included with Windows CE is a basic four-function calculator with memory and a pseudo paper tape display. This is sufficient for many users, but if you need to do scientific or business calculating, a more advanced calculator is a must. Odyssey Computing provides such a calculator with Pocket BizCalc, a Windows CE and Windows 95 calculator program that emulates the popular HP-12C calculator.

Installation is a two-step process. The software is installed from a single floppy disk onto the user’s hard drive and then transferred to the H/PC. This installation process leaves about 930Kb on the users desktop PC hard drive and a single 214Kb file on the H/PC. Once installed on the H/PC, the files on the desktop can be removed.

Installation automatically creates an icon for the program. Tap the icon and the program launches in eight to ten seconds (on my HP 320LX). Once open, the program fills the entire screen (is scaled to fit my 320LX’s larger screen).

The top menu bar includes five pull-down menus (File, Edit, View, Tape, and Help). To the right of these are eight tool bar icons (new, open file, save, copy, paste, and three icons for controlling the tape display). The left side of the screen is taken up with numerous buttons to support all of the built-in functions of the 12C. This includes separate buttons for functions invoked by a “prefix key” on the 12C. Since the H/PC doesn’t have a prefix key, there are over 100 buttons to invoke all the functions. This may be a bit confusing to some users; especially those used to the layout of the 12C.

All of the HP 12C functions are included, as well as some extra features. The 12C supports only 99 programming steps, BizCalc users can create and save programs with up to 999 steps. The 12C’s one-line display is replaced with an eight-line tape register. The tape register allows for either tape, memory, or register views. In addition to all of the built-in HP 12C functions, Pocket BizCalc also includes several functions that are available on the 12C, but require multiple keystrokes to accomplish. This includes several business functions and a key to calculate pi.

The built-in help function provides short summaries of each key’s function, with examples for many. It covers most topics sufficiently, but there’s no substitute for the manual (and possible a primer on the HP 12C for advanced users).
Pocket BizCalc retails for $39.95, which is a lot less expensive than competing programs or a new HP 12C. Sluggish speed and a large storage footprint (over 10% of a 2 Mb H/PC) are its only drawbacks.

The Pocket BizCalc displayed on the HP 320LX. The opening screen displays the number pad in the middle of the screen, business and scientific functions to the left, and a “tape” to the right documenting the steps you’ve executed in the calculation.

Pocket Finance

LandWare Software

Review By Randolph Sly

I’ve spent years with PDA’s and have discovered that I use some applications a lot, some a little, and some almost never. Pocket Finance falls into the “used a little” category — an application that I don’t use often, but rely on to track important information and make readily available when I need it. Pocket Quicken was one such application on my old HP 200LX. I always had a basic financial report available whenever I needed it. When I began using my H/PC, Quicken was missed immediately. While checking out H/PC software from independent developers, I came across Pocket Finance, a program that gave me most of what I missed from Quicken.

Developed by Any Ware Consulting and first distributed with the name Personal ATM, Pocket Finance is now distributed by LandWare. Pocket Finance is a basic but powerful check register. In fact, when you open up PF, it looks a great deal like a standard check register on the screen.

Financial data (checks, deposits, ATM withdrawals) is entered either on the register itself for basic information or by opening an edit window for greater detail. For each record you can enter a date, check number, description, amount of transaction, and specify it as either a deposit or payment. A balance forward is automatically computed. The Edit window lets you enter further details about the transaction, including a pop-up list for the category and subcategory of the transaction and a memo line for additional notes. Finally, a check box is available to indicate whether or not the check has cleared.

The export module of the application, accessed from the task bar, allows you to upload Pocket Finance data to a PC running the desktop Pocket Finance application. From there it can be transferred to a desktop version of Quicken using Quicken Interchange Format (QIF). The desktop Pocket Finance can also transfer Quicken files into Pocket Finance on the H/PC.
At first, I had a hard time using the transaction details window. I kept re-entering information, waiting for Pocket Finance to post the information in the register view and disappear. Later, I found several multiple entries on the register behind the transaction window. I realized that the register and transaction details windows are active all the time. Clicking on the transaction button simply displays or hides it. All I had to do was enter the data and it was there.

Another thing that gave me problems was the font size. I found Pocket Finance’s screen very hard to read in the smaller font mode (which is the permanent default). I changed it to the larger font option, but found the readability only marginally acceptable. I would love to be able to change the font to an even larger size and different font style.

More software of this type will probably appear after Windows CE 2.0 is released, but Pocket Finance is a good start. I don’t miss Quicken as much with this application on my H/PC. I hope that its developers will continue to improve and strengthened this program as the Windows CE environment blossom

Pocket Finance’s main register (background) with edit window open to an individual item.

Craig has been a handheld, palmtop and PDA user for over five years. Visit his H/PC web site at www.craigtech.co.uk, or email Craig at craig@craigtech.co.uk.

Michael is a Board Certified Real Estate Attorney with a strong interest in handheld computing.

WindowsCE Webring