Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: granr@sasknet.sk.ca (Ron Grant) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Final Calc V1.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 25 Oct 1995 01:24:44 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 272 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <46k3ks$nqg@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: granr@sasknet.sk.ca (Ron Grant) NNTP-Posting-Host: scooby.cs.umass.edu Keywords: spreadsheet, commercial Originator: barrett@scooby.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME Final Calc V1.0 BRIEF DESCRIPTION A new, powerful spreadsheet for the Amiga. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Author: Khalid Aldoseri Publisher: Softwood, Inc. Address: PO Box 50178 Phoenix, AZ 85076 USA Phone: (602) 431-0949 Orders: (800) 247-8330 (USA. & Canada) LIST PRICE $249.00 (US) SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga with 2 Megabytes of memory, though 3 Megabytes is strongly recommended. About 5 megabytes of Hard Disk space. SOFTWARE: AmigaDOS 2.0 or higher for full functionality. Will run on AmigaDOS 1.2 and 1.3. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 2000 with G-Force 030-40MHz CPU 1MB Chip, 12 MB Fast RAM Kickstart 40.63 (3.1) Workbench 40.42 (3.1) INSTALLATION Final Calc is supplied on four floppy disks. Installation is simple and uses the Commodore 'Install' program. Several versions of the program are supplied. The installer selects the likely candidate for the system -- in my case the 68030 FPU version. REVIEW (Preliminary) I have been waiting for a long time for a new spreadsheet to replace MaxiPlan. I NEED a spreadsheet program, and was very happy to have one from Softwood, with their long history of unfailing Amiga support. This is a complex program with many features that I have not had a chance to become familiar with. This review is not complete since there are many discoveries remaining to be made. The manual is a serious piece of work supplied in a mini 3-ring binder. There are 9 Chapters, 10 Appendices, and an index. There are a few areas in the manual that are too brief and without examples, such as accessing database functions with formulas. Otherwise, though, it is good reading for many hours. There are some sample sheets and some sample macros which help with becoming familiar with the program. Up to now, I had always used Maxiplan. I was resigned to entering some of the sheets again manually. Final Calc will import and export Lotus 1-2-3 ".WKS" and ".WK1", but Maxiplan will not export in any other format except its own. I discovered "accidentally" that Final Calc WILL import Maxiplan files. The loading is automatic -- Final Calc can tell which format the file is in. The brochure from Softwood mentions the Lotus 1-2-3 file support, but the support for Maxiplan came as a complete and welcome surprise. It would be nice to see more spreadsheet types supported, though in my case, I was satisfied. In my view, it is a vital key that Amiga programs support as many other popular formats as possible. This is more important even than programs running on the pee-cee. Hopefully, Excel and some of the other Amiga spreadsheet formats will be included in the future. Help is available through AmigaGuide at any time. As you work on a sheet, the number of changes made is displayed at the lower right of the screen. A multi-level "UNDO / REDO" looked after any mistakes I made. There are facilities for backup to a path chosen by the user, as well as Auto Save and Revision control. File encryption with a password is also provided which is a nice touch. The user can work with single sheets, or with projects consisting of many sheets. Formulas, macros and ranges can address any area of any sheet in multi-dimensional fashion for all sheets in a project. It was quite simple to collect several years of "Income" sheets into one project. Movement through the project is quite easy and done in a logical fashion. I didn't like the way the cursor keys worked at first, at least they didn't yield expected results in true Amiga fashion. As I used it more, though, I realized that the system is set up to recognize a number of modes, such as edit, input and ranges. For example, during edit, the edit area works like any Amiga string gadget. During entry, shift-cursor goes a page at a time while alt-cursor goes to the limits of the sheet. Pressing the TAB key places the program into the 'range' mode so that ranges can be defined using the cursor keys. It is apparent that the Author gave a lot of thought into the many different ways of moving about the sheet. There is even the '/' right slash implemented to bring the menus up at the bottom of the screen in the old VisiCalc style! As you can see, there are many ways of getting the job done. I didn't personally like the way screen colours are handled. If you try to colour a cell while only 2 bitplanes (4 colours) are used in the current screen, the colour type IS stored in the cell, but the cells appearance is unchanged. Going to 3 bitplanes (8 colours) enables 8 colour selection which works as you'd expect. But if you go the screen palette, there are only four colours available to set. Even on a 4 bitplane screen (16 colours), you only have access to palette customizing of 4 colours! What are the rest of the colours for, you ask? Well, they are used in the system of graphs, which is the best graphs I have ever seen. They are breath-taking. Still, I would like to have control and access to those colours from the screen interface, so that the colours used in the cells could be adjusted as in Turbo Calc. BUGS / DISLIKES There are a few bugs, as might expect in a V1.0 release: o Printing may not always be formatted as expected. o This includes graphs, though only on some graph types o Loading a Maxiplan sheet with a database defined can result in an immediate system crash. o Defining a criteria range which overlaps into other formulas can result in a lock-up. A criteria range should never overlap other formulas, but then the program shouldn't crash either! Re-boot required. These are some bugs which while potentially serious, I had to really look for at least in terms of the crashes. The biggest downfall of this program is not a bug at all, just a design limitation in the database provisions. DISLIKES o Final Calc's implementation of Database functions utilize the usual Input Range, Offset and Criteria Range. However only ONE criteria can be chosen. IE: DSUM(input_range, offset, criteria) will NOT work. The offset parameter is the only one supported, IE: DSUM (offset). As a result, most database operations are not available. For example, if we have a list of 10 companies which send payments from time to time, we can use the database functions to: o List all payments in excess of say, $100.00. o List all payments received from say, XYZ Corp. But we cannot: o Total all payments received by EACH of the ten companies. o Count the total number of payments received by each company. This would require that ten criteria ranges be defined and that DSUM() and DCOUNT() could accept the criteria parameter which it cannot do. This is a serious limitation which will have to be addressed immediately for this program to be of use. o Cursor speed preference should be saved Globally, rather than stored with each individual sheet. o Scrolling with the mouse is difficult. The scroll occurs as desired, but just try to stop or back up! You'll end up using the cursor keys, which work fine. o Selecting a range by hitting the TAB key then using the cursor keys works as expected except that if you overshoot your desired ending cell, backing up doesn't deselect the undesired cells. The cursor behaves properly, but the undesired cells don't become un-highlighted. o When setting column width using CTRL NumPad 4 , 6 I would like to see column width displayed. In fact, I'd like to see it displayed whenever a column is selected. o I'd like to see Text style icons in the toolbar reflect the style setting in use as in done in Final Writer. o When titles are frozen for the first time, the action should also set Toggle Titles to on. As it stands, if you mistakenly select toggle titles on a sheet where no titles have been frozen, then when you freeze titles, it appears NOT to work. In fact, if you choose Toggle Titles they will be frozen as expected. I thought the Title freeze wasn't working until I discovered that they had been toggled off. LIKES Aside from the list of items above, this really is a fine spreadsheet program -- surprisingly complete. This program can actually serve as a word processor with great font and style support. Many little features crop up each time I play with it, or read the manual. One favourite is 'Amiga /' which performs the last menu selection. Excellent Format support and Date/Time support with full macro functions internal, and ARexx make this a gold mine for script writers. Pull down menus change with the mode and present the user with endless possible actions. There are many nice touches such as: o Requesters may be built right from scripts with user responses going into cells. o Will compare sheets o Full print spooling system under user control o Undo/Redo storage - can bring up undo list and pick event o Multivariate regression analysis o Animation - Charts may be animated over time and increments of any values o Full colour and pattern support (including palette) for all colours for the charting system. o Column (A, B ,C etc.) and Row (1,2,3 etc.) can be named anything you like. Great for calendars where instead of A, B, C you can have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday etc. CONCLUSIONS This is a serious release long overdue to the Amiga marketplace. It is a stable program as it stands except as noted above. With the vendor support which should be forthcoming from Softwood from past experience, it seems likely that this program will evolve into the premiere spreadsheet program for the Amiga. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1995 Ron G. Grant. All rights reserved. This review is freely distributable. You can contact me at: granr@sasknet.sk.ca -------------------------------------------------------------- Ron G. Grant VE5RG granr@sasknet.sk.ca FAX: +1.306.781.4098 ============================================================== --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews