Reference number: CH000088

Is the Palm Pilot right for me?

Question:

Complete Question: "I am a teacher. I use a grade book program called, amazingly enough Grade Book Power. It is dos, I run it on my PC, and the manual states that the requirements for its use are: at least 512K, and two disk drives or a hard disk and one diskette, a program diskette and a blank formatted diskette for student data. I use the data disk to store student data, when using the PC...I realize there is not \ floppy drive in the Palm pilot...but is there some way around this? (Not familiar enough with the Palm Pilot capabilities to figure this one out.) I'd love a palmtop that I can do word 97 (or compatible) documents on, this grade book program (and transfer grades at home to the PC) and e-mail and if time (hahahaha!) web browsing. Is the Palm Pilot for me? If not, is there a Palmtop unit out there that is?"

Answer:

The Palm Pilot (Palm computer) will unfortunately not be able to run your grade book program because the Palm Pilot is made to run software that is designed for the Palm Pilot. Most likely, we are assuming, that the program that you are using, because ran through DOS, is an older program. Because of this, unless someone has made the software for that program on the Palm Pilot, you would be unable to utilize it.

Also, unfortunately, at the current time the Palm Pilot is not capable of running or using a floppy drive; however, the Palm Pilot comes with a docking station that allows you to transfer data via a serial cable to and from your computer. The Palm Pilot, at this current time, is not capable of running Word 97. However, you could use these files on your Desktop computer and then transfer the files onto the Palm Pilot for temporary usage.

If you are planning to keep the statistics of each of your students, this can be done with third-party programs, which you can utilize on the Palm Pilot. However, if these statistics need to be in a certain format or need to be in Word format, we would not recommend the Palm Pilot for this use.