Who knows, Alan Bond may yet again become a millionaire. But one thing’s for sure, he will never get back the two years he spend in jail. This it is with PC owners. They make a huge investment in their computer programs. The money is trivial. The investment is in time. The money spent on a dud program can always be re-earned; the time is gone forever.
Few users will willingly toss out a program they have learned for something supposedly superior. It is hard to get people to swap from one program to another, let alone swap from Apple to MS-DOS or vice versa.
Some people are forced to swap because they change jobs and the new one has different programs. But generally people grow into a program or family of programs and stay with them, and will announce the programs they use are the best thing since sliced bread even though many other users are quite happy and healthy eating multi-grain rolls.
Sometimes, new programs are so good that it is pointless batting on with the old, no matter how much time has been invested in learning them. With the arrival of Windows 3.1 I have chucked out three loaves of sliced bread and replaced them with multi-grain. I no longer a communications package (to send files to distant computers or receive material from distant databases) because the terminal program on Windows does it better. I no longer use a file-management program because Windows does it better. I have five years chucked out a database program because the Microsoft Excel 4 spreadsheet-database program does it better.
Much has been written about Windows 3.1. I’ll stick here to Excel 4.
The Excel vs Lotus brawl will go on interminably. The competition between them is excellent for users. It is quite intense. Excel has gone out of its way to enable users to save files and macros to be compatible with Lotus and to receive Lotus files easily, to ease the pain of transition for those who want to swap. Microsoft did the same thing with its Word program to entice Word Perfect users.
The joy of Excel 4 is that it defies the usual principle of computing that the more a program does the harder it is to use.
The basic aim of a spreadsheet program is to be able to manipulate columns of figures. The simplest manipulation is to add them up. They can be sorted into categories (date, kind of payment, kind of receipt and so on). Percentages, averages, divisions, seasonal adjustments and so on can be made. With each addition of new data the program does the calculations automatically.
Thus the work done in last year’s tax return on depreciation is picked up next year. The work done to calculate the sales of five different sorts of products achieved by each salesperson in one quarter can be used the next quarter.
Essentially, through cross-referencing and extraction Excel can dissect a business and the people in it.
Excel 4 has a Help window which stays on the screen while you execute whatever task you sought help on. It allows you to customise the screen so you can create icons for common tasks and just click on the icons to execute them. It now has spell-checking for illiterate or careless accountants.
For large spreadsheets it enables you to freeze the rows containing the headings or other key calculations at the top of the screen so they can be seen while you are adding new data at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
It has got an impressive array of fuzzy logic functions, which might be more properly defined as second-guessing the user. Thus if you start a column by entering a couple of dates a month apart, the program will continue the series down the column. The dates could be quarterly. Or it could be any other incremental format.
The program will second-guess that the user wants certain type fonts copied along a row or down a column. It has other useful features to improve the printed output.
You can make charts very quickly from data with a feature called Chart Wizzard.
Chart Wizzard is an extraordinary programming achievement. The innumerate and graphically inept can make presentable charts. The program takes you through step-by-step giving you options on whether you want a pie, column, 3-D chart, legends, labels and so on. As you do each step you see the result in a window in an instant. If you like it you can go on to the next step, if not you can go back.
The resulting chart can be shrunk or expanded to scale or stretched or expanded in either direction. It is seriously sensational. The key not being what it produces, which is impressive enough, but the ease with which it produces it.
With appropriate hardware, the program can also be used to create a slide show of charts, spreadsheets and database reports.
The database part of the program is superb, once again not so much for what it can do, but the ease with which it does it. It can be used to store and retrieve information on combinations of fields such as names, addresses, occupations, salaries, inventories, book catalogues, prices, purchase dates and so on. It sorts and reports. It can sort and retrieve according to inputted criteria. Once again it uses pop-up windows to make inputting of data, sorting and retrieving very easy.
A major addition to Excel 4 is its “”scenario manager” and statistical analysis tools. Economic modelling has had a bad press recently. Excel 4 perhaps should not be used as a political tool, but it is a good business tool. The aim of these tools is to input hypothetical data to see what the result is. What you put get out depends, of course, on what you put in.
The documentation that comes with Excel 4 is intelligently divided into three volumes: Basic, Advanced and Database, each with its own index. The index is very comprehensive, which is essential for a computer manual.
Excel exports to and imports from other programs well and with ease from Word for Windows 2.
A suggestion for Excel 5 and Word for Windows 3 would be to share program files to save disk space. There seems little point in having two huge dictionaries on disk for spellchecking in each program. Surely the programmers who created ChartWizzard cold created a space saving method to share program files for those parts of the program which are similar to other Microsoft programs.