One reason why it's cool to have WindowsCE on your mobile phone.
Like most Americans (and many others around the world), I've spent a lot of time the passed few weeks shopping for Christmas presents. Actually, I didn't spend that much until this week, which was part of the problem, so this week was a panic.
Anyway, most of the gifts I was buying were for my many nieces & nephews. The problem here is that one needs to get a present which is age appropriate, and their ages keep changing. OK, they only increment by one each year, but it still difficult to keep track. ("So, Jessica, she must be 16 or 17 now.....um..no....She's 20 and her army unit is stationed in Korea")
So, then I had an idea. I wrote a simple Excel spreadsheet with each's name and birthdate, then added a simple formula to convert the birthday into their age ("=(TODAY()-D1)/365") (I divided by 365 instead of using the Year() function so I could get a decimal place) (and storing the birthday and calculating the age means it'll work next year without having to update it)
My original plan was to load it onto my PDA, but then I though, "Doesn't Windows SmartPhone come with Excel?" .. Well, actually it doesn't, but Cingular bundled a third party spreadsheet viewer, which was all I needed.
So, I just had to look at my phone to find out everyone's age.