"A PDA? Why do you need a PDA? It's all so old-fashioned!" he says.Yep, ability to access and update my data on-the-go has been and still is important for me.
"Well, there are certain things that I wanna do when I don't have a computer. A device like PDA would be useful."
"Like what?"
"Keeping track of my bike's mileage, for example."
"Use Excel dude. Why would you buy a PDA for something an Excel sheet on your computer can do?"
"No no, I won't remember to update the sheet then. I should be able to do it on-the-go."
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I have been owning a motorcycle for about 5 years now, and one of the things I really care about is keeping track of the fuel efficiency of the bike. I create a spreadsheet that looks like this. Mileage column would be automatically calculated by a formula.
Of late, I get nervous if my data is not on cloud. Any data that is only available in a device that I own is at risk. And I try to avoid it as much as possible. Naturally, I created a Google Docs spreadsheet and started keeping track of the bike's mileage.
Now for the on-the-go update part. Sure, I can open the sheet on my phone and update it. But opening and updating a spreadsheet on a 2G mobile network is painfully slow. So I went around and created a form for this sheet. Whenever I fill petrol or run out of petrol, I pull up this form on my phone and enter the details.
Since it's a very simple HTML form with very little JavaScript, it loads fast even on a slow, congested network. Saving the data is quite easy too, since all it has to send to the server is a few bytes.
In a low bandwidth environment, you can always use List View. View-->List View or by changing ccc in the URL to LV. Otherwise the form is a cool way to do it too.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Ronald. List view is what we get by default when we open a Google Docs spreadsheet from a mobile phone. That itself feels heavy for my usage, that's why I started using forms.
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