AccessPanel Platinum Edition
AccessPanel Platinum Edition is a utility that resides in the tray of your Palm-sized PC or H/PC. It shows up as a little lightning bolt icon in the tray, as shown in Figure A. Because of the great versatility of its functions, I like to call it a pocketknife for Windows CE.

FIGURE A

With AccessPanel Platinum Edition, your imagination is your only limit. Click picture for a larger image.

Capabilities
Among its many capabilities, it allows you to store pre-defined information in a library so it can be made available at a later time. This would be excellent for storing formulas and related information for science classes. It's a great way to refresh your memory if you have lots of information to remember.

Another great feature is the ability to configure formats that act as templates. These templates can extract certain information from Windows CE's Contacts program or perform other pre-defined functions. Then it will ready the material for copying to the clipboard. From there, you may then paste it into any application supporting a paste function. AccessPanel can also paste the time and date into other applications in multiple ways. This is great for logging events or creating reports in a few simple taps. In Figure B, you can see that I've prepared AccessPanel for another type of pasting operation.

FIGURE B

Here, AccessPanel is ready to paste the current date and time into Pocket Excel. Click picture for a larger image.

The AccessPanel utility also includes a built-in phone dialer that emits DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) tones through the speaker of your PDA that can dial a touch-tone phone for you. This feature supports calling cards as well.

To prevent you from losing vital timesaving formats, a backup and restore utility is built in, as well. This allows you to store a backup file of your formats somewhere safe.

There are too many uses for this tool to list them all, but I'm sure you'll find it'll come in handy for something. It's such a versatile tool, about the only thing you can't do is cut a tin can with it.

Further reading on AccessPanel
If you're interested in reading any more of my thoughts on Developer One's AccessPanel Platinum Edition, please view the June 1999 back issue of Windows CE Power Magazine for my article regarding ten must-have applications. It's available at http://www.windowscepower.com/issues/issue199906/newuser001.html.