What's available to replace AW spreadsheet routine?

[Keith Nichols]

AW spreadsheets and spreadsheet frames work fine, except that I can't get the cell-reference feature to perform consistently among the spreadsheets. So I figure I'll need a whole new spreadsheet program one day. What's available? My favorite so far has been Lotus 123, which I used in the early 1980s on my Texas Instruments PC. I still have the big floppy disk carrying the program, but of course I've no TIPC to run it on nor any manual for it.

[haumann]

AW spreadsheets and spreadsheet frames work fine, except that I can't get the cell-reference feature to perform consistently among the spreadsheets. So I figure I'll need a whole new spreadsheet program one day. What's available? My favorite so far has been Lotus 123, ...

And Lotus _was_ able to pull this off?

If you need a spreadsheet, there's Excel, MarinerCalc, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, just to name a few. But I'm not sure there's any other choice that will integrate spreadsheets into a text document (if that's what you need) as well as AppleWorks.

You said the cell-reference feature doesn't perform consistently among the spreadsheets. Does this occur regularly in various documents, or just with one particular document combination?

John@was

[Keith Nichols]

Haumann, thanks for your response. I guess your question, “And Lotus _was_ able to pull this off?” refers to Lotus’ ability to identify and move among cells and spreadsheets like AW does. Lotus could name cells and ranges and move among different spreadsheets, but maybe not as easily as AW is supposed to. Since the program was not integrated with the TIPC’s word processor (EasyWriter, I believe), there may have been no way to make frames in text. This wasn't something I needed at that time.

Right now, the AW spreadsheet scheme for collecting data from named frames and cells works only sporadically. Often the program refuses to recognize the name I assign to a frame or cell. Currently, I have a reference to a frame and cell that works fine but is identified as a “BADCELL” on the screen. Even to get this degree of success took me a long time, because the system refused to accept the cell address. I finally found that naming the cell was necessary.

I have fond memories of Lotus mainly because it worked well as a hands-on spreadsheet machine and then because of its macros, which enabled all the program’s hands-on functions to be deployed under control of boolean logical functions typed onto the spreadsheet in an area away from the data display. The program was quite user-friendly because its parts were well thought out and well integrated, which led to the user manual being logically constructed and easy to follow.

For example, I wrote a Lotus routine by which a clerk in a copy center was able to enter into one spreadsheet two items of data for each job as it arrived and at the end of the month provide listings of each customer’s costs for the month. This was done by summoning a macro that activated further macros that sorted all the jobs by customer, calculated the cost of each job, and totalled all costs for each customer. The number and types of jobs varied from month to month, so the program had to skip columns that happened to be blank that month, find the extent of columns containing entries, sort them according to customer, cost each job according to material type, etc. Since no single spreadsheet could handle all the data and macros involved, the system proceeded by copying various columns of numbers and moving them to fresh spreadsheets containing their own macros and finally printing the results. All this was done with the CRT monitor inactive after a macro shut if off to save the time involved in constantly refreshing the display. I think that AW has no ability to do this much macro-ing, and if it worked as spottily as the frame- and cell-referencing scheme, it wouldn’t be reliable, anyway.