A review by Rod Farr Working with Quattro Pro 8

part from me being terribly slack, the gradual features overlap that has been also provided. I must say that I’ve never Athis article has taken me an proceeding for some software generations actually used cross tabs very much. For inordinate time to put now. And, as together(thanks for the patience, Vic). The might be expected problem has been that I feared that it with Corel lineage would be hard to say something new now, there are a about a spreadsheet application. But I was number of wrong. There are a number of features in graphical features. Corel’s latest version of Quattro Pro, From the version 8. that are both useful and wordprocessor, desirable. there is now a Corel Quattro Pro 8 is the latest in a WYSIWYG page line of extremely good spreadsheet view that enables applications. Version 8 is a Win95 the User to work application so users of Windows 3.1 miss with a notebook out I’m afraid. The review copy was one page as it will part of the WordPerfect 8 suite. I imagine appear when that it is available as a separate product. printed. Anyone Quattro began when Borland decided who has had to try (to its eventual cost) to move strongly into to reformat a page containing all or part of some reason, I’ve never constructed a the field of applications rather than a complex spreadsheet so that it will fit on spreadsheet that would have benefitted concentrating on development tools and the printed A4 page will welcome this from pivoting data to get an alternative Sidekick. Then it was a real challenger to innovation. And cell formatting now view or other manipulation by way of the king of the DOS spreadsheet encompasses multiple fonts, sizes and text cross tabs, or maybe I’ve never applications, Lotus attributes within cells as well as recognised when using cross tabs would 1-2-3. As Borland the ability to have multiple lines have helped. found it had bitten of text within a cell. Cells can be Then there is a cell reference checker off more than it joined for ease of heading to check and fix formulae that refer to other could chew in the construction and superscript and cells, a concept that many a debugger applications field subscript are also finally could use. And debugger lineage shows and returned to available. out in the very handy Quick Cell feature development tools, Additional emphasis can be that allows a cell to be dragged to the Quattro moved on to added by incorporating clip art Application Bar (QP8’s name for what was the care of and creating fancy text. Fancy formerly the Status Bar at the bottom of WordPerfect. The text is presented in different the QP8 Window) so that it’s updated baton was finally shapes and designs like value can be seen as you change the passed to Corel pennants, waves and circles like values in other cells. Just like a variable (along with WordPerfect). And they have this. watch in a debugger. done a pretty good job in maintaining and The outliner heritage shows in a very The auditing feature also has a enhancing a real competitor to the useful feature when dealing with complex debugger heritage. Auditing a ubiquitous Microsoft’s Excel. spreadsheets that enables data to be spreadsheet you can trace dependent So what’s new with Quattro Pro 8 grouped into collapsible and expandable cells, precedents and errors. Very useful (henceforth QP8), the spreadsheet sets so that the detail can be put aside in large and complex models. application that introduced the notebook until needed to give an overview of the Now, on to QP8 proper. The following metaphor to Windows? bigger picture. is a once over lightly that doesn’t do more Quite a few things actually, some that A Quick Filter process owes a lot to than touch the surface. There is an awful have their heritage in word processing and databases. It enables the user to focus on lot in QP8! outliners and some that trace their lineage key information by removing data from the The Main Window from debuggers. There is even a bit more view that is irrelevant to the question Opening QP8 the user is presented of the database application to emphasize being asked. New cross tab facilities are with the a fairly typical first page of a

6 February 1998 SIXTEEN BITS The Property Bar is of adjoining cells, right click and choose context sensitive. For QuickFill or use the toolbar button. Voila, example, a different the months of the year are automatically Property Bar appears inserted, one to a selected cell in the row when creating a chart. or column, in the same format, ie, Feb, Mar, You can decide whether etc. Don’t like abbreviated names for the or not to display the months? Then type in the full name of Property Bar. Just check your initial month as the starter and watch or uncheck the Property the full month names QuickFilled. Bar item in the toolbar Consecutive numbers - 1,2 etc; Quarters - menu. Q1, Q2, etc; years - 1997, 1998, etc can all The Action Bar is at be inserted by QuickFill. the bottom of the QuickFit is a nifty little do-dad window. The notebook available from the Format menu or the page controls lie toolbar. It will automatically widen a immediately above the column to the width of the largest entry in Win95 spreadsheet. A toolbar and a Action Bar. Right clicking (did I mention that column. Not that you need to do this Property Bar appear below the menus. that Quattro began the rush to right if you are entering number formats other You can create your own toolbars (click clicking in Windows spreadsheets?) on a than general or scientific or numbers in View/Toolbars/Create) to design a toolbar notebook sheet tab produces a popup text format because the column will that has buttons for the features and menu with choices to edit the name of the automatically resize for you, but it’s handy macros that you find yourself regularly sheet, set sheet properties, for example, especially for labels and other text. using. Or you can select an appropriate the tab colour or whether grid lines are Data Entry toolbar/Property Bar from a menu that shown, or insert or delete a sheet. Naming Not much to say about entering text appears with a right mouse button click a sheet to something more meaningful and numbers, really. All very standard. A on the current toolbar. There are separate than A, B, etc. is as simple as double- cell entry beginning with a symbol (one toolbars/Property Bars for selection clicking (left mouse button this time!) the of + - $ ( @ . # or =) is recognised as a formatting, data manipulation, charting Tab and typing in the label you want. formula or value unless preceded by a ‘. and chart colour schemes, drawing, Creating Your Spreadsheet All other entries are treated as text labels. outlining, auditing and numeric tools - There has been a lot of work done in Reference to cells in the various sheets some 35 different ones in all. recent versions of the major spreadsheet within a notebook is by sheetname:cell co- If you leave the default notebook applications to ease the drudgery of ordinates, eg, A:B23. toolbar, or any other selected toolbar setting up the format. QP8 has a full range Moving and copying data can be checked in the menu, it remains in place of tools, under the SpeedFormat, undertaken by the familiar cut and paste and the newly selected toolbar generally QuickFormat and QuickFill banners, that routine or by the equally familiar drag and appears as an additional toolbar below the do exactly that. drop. The default when dragging is to existing toolbar and above the Property You can use SpeedFormat to make cell move the selected cells. Press Ctrl when Bar. To get rid of a toolbar/Property Bar, lines and borders visible and printable. dragging to make a copy. You can also simply uncheck it in the right click You can use it to format cell with one of 24 copy or move the content of selected cells generated menu. The toolbars for the predetermined colour shading schemes. to another notebook. Make sure that the outlining and auditing features appear on QuickFormat (available from a popup other notebook is open and drag the the left side of the window, squeezing in menu generated by a right mouse click or selected cells to the notebook title on the the working area of the notebook page. the toolbar) lets you Application Bar. You can then drag them paste the format from within that other notebook to wherever a selected range of you want the information placed. cells to all You can link data from one notebook subsequent to another using Paste Special/Link from selections until the the Edit menu. Useful when more than one feature is turned off. person is working on a series of separate QuickFill fills the but interlinked spreadsheets. selected range of To add a note or comment about a cell cells according to the and its contents, right click the cell and first cell you have select Insert Comment. After typing in input. For example, your comment into the box that appears type “Jan” (without and clicking on the sheet to exit, the cell’s the quotes) into a top right corner shows a little red triangle. cell, select that cell Moving the cursor to the cell brings up and a row or column the note in a tasteful pale yellow box.

8 February 1998 SIXTEEN BITS The PCUG needs more PCUG staff to supervise the Being a Centre staff member is a great way to PCUG Centre which is located in Northpoint Plaza, meet people and make new friends. The Centre is oposite Belconnen Town Centre. also used by PCUG members for Training Courses, The Centre’s staff attend the frontdesk for half a Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Internet Clinics, and day or a full day (the choice is theirs), either on a so on. Saturday or a Sunday, once every 2-3 months. (The If you would like to help the PCUG by becoming one Centre is not open over the Christmas/New Year of the staff members please contact any one of the period or during long week-ends.) Committee members (listed on page 3 of Sixteen Bits) or The duties are not onerous (handling members’ contact me, Basil Chupin, on telephone number 6285 2353 enquiries, membership renewals and so on). Training during the day or send an e-mail message to will be provided, and there will be an experienced [email protected]. person with you on your first session to guide you Please consider. You will be providing a valuable service and provide moral support. to your User Group.

SIXTEEN BITS February 1998 9 Move the cursor off the cell and the braces, like this: {CALC}. There are escapes me at the moment, it sure is nifty). comment disappears. Comments can be macros for keyboard use, for screen Note that not all the graphical bits and great value for trying to work out what on characteristics, for program flow, for UI pieces are installed with the Typical earth you intended to do with this cell six building (including adding and removing installation. You have to use the custom months after constructing the custom menu items) and so on. There are installation option and then cycle through even macros for OLE and DDE usage. a large range of choices about components to be installed to get some things, maps Graphically Displaying Your Data being one of them. Quattro has always been noted for its Finally, having charted your data, you charting. QP8 overwhelms with the range can opt for a slide show presentation - of choices available. You can have bar or something QP8 does very well. Who rotated bar graphs: regular, stacked or in spreadsheet. Comments can be deleted needs a presentation application multiple columns. You can have pie charts: from the menu. (although Corel Presentations 8 is regular, doughnut or multiple. You can included in the suite)? Manipulating Your Data have, line or area graphs: regular, 3D, What can’t you do with a spreadsheet stacked or surface. You can have radar Filters these days? Nothing that I can identify graphs, high/low graphs or combinations Thinking of switching to QP8 from right now but the price paid is the another spreadsheet application? complexity of an ever increasing QP8 sports a fairly comprehensive numbers of built in functions - range of filters from Outside IN about 500 of them in QP8. They Viewer Technology that not only cover database operations, let you import spreadsheets from engineering (including complex Excel (including v7) and Lotus 1- numbers), financial (including 2-3 in its various flavours but also annuity calculations, Bills and to save files in those formats. I Bonds), logical operations, haven’t had occasion to explore mathematical, statistical and this feature in any detail, but a brief string. A function for every look at a fairly straightforward season! Excel spreadsheet gave a flawless A toolbar function button import except for dates that had assists you to build complex been input as text in the dd/mm/ formula. But in the end, yy format. I guess that these were unfortunately perhaps, there’s no probably being misinterpreted as real substitute for development time. of bar and line or area graphs. And you multi-level divisions. Then there are goal seek and optimiser can choose any one of 14 colour You can also save your QP8 tools that enable you to calculate a formula combinations. Phew! spreadsheets as HTML documents. I did or formulae backwards. Both can be very Not only that, if you want to really not get a perfect HTML document in my useful features in the right circumstances. pretty-up your charts, you can colour few experiments, or at least, Netscape chart backgrounds and even bars on interpreted the files in tables a bit oddly, Macros graphs with any of the large range of but certainly a fair start that you could QP8 offers two macro systems. QP included backgrounds. work further with. macros are particular to the notebook in But wait. There’s more. You can also which they are created (although they can introduce maps (yes, be copied to another notebook) and can Australia is included) to be created by writing them or recording really make that sale by keystrokes. PerfectScript macros are region data have an stored in files and can be used across a impact, or any other data range of notebooks or elsewhere in the that lends itself to a map WordPerfect 8 suite. display. There is even the PerfectScript is a command based facility to overlay your language that records the results of map of the USA with the keystrokes or mouse selections instead highway grid (although of recording the keystrokes/selections the use of this in the themselves. It’s not Visual Basic but it is Australian context pretty complete as a macro language. Macro commands surrounded in curly

10 February 1998 SIXTEEN BITS Manual and Help or the boss might desire. And you can do Lets just say that the manual is it in style. POSITION VACANT minimal - the basics and nothing more. Will Excel users switch? A bit doubtful, Training Room Manager The on-line Help, however, is I suppose, but they wouldn’t lose anything comprehensive. But I like something by and would even gain some functionality. Room for a manager way of paper to wade through (I’ve even I’ve seen the WordPerfect 8 suite been known to read a manual before using advertised in the computer press at $229 The PCUG Centre is looking for a an application) and on-line help doesn’t recently. Not a bad price for QP8 alone. Training Room Manager. This is a lend itself to that. There are instructions responsible position and involves in the Help for creating your own manuals organising the hiring out the on various topics at the cost of your time, Centre’s training room and paper and printer consumables which still equipment to outside bodies as well seems like a cop-out to me. as PCUG groups, and negotiating Additional help is available via the appropriate fees. PerfectExpert. This feature pops up in the left side of the window and can walk The incumbent is required to you through almost anything to do with negotiate agreements, maintin QP8, except those things that lie solely accurate schedules, ensure in the user’s domain, such as the appropriate security for PCUG construction of complex formulae. While premises and equipment, and report this is particularly useful when you are regularly to the Committee. learning to use QP8, it would be largely This position carries a small irrelevant for any user who was up to *************** remuneration in the form of speed. commission based on successful Summary C:\DOS hire-outs. To summarise, QP8 is an excellent C:\DOS\RUN example of a spreadsheet. You can do RUN\DOS\RUN To apply, contact the Secretary on virtually everything with it that your heart [email protected]. ***************

TIP ‘Monopoly’ Hours

TIP has now been operating for over two and a half years and the Internet Project Management Committee has decided it is time to modify the ‘monopoly’ hours scheme which is used to discourage overuse of TIP facilities. From 1 October 1997, the ‘penalty’ rates will start to operate after TWO hours use on any day, not one hour as at present. TIP time logged on will be debited to your account at the following rates:

First TWO hours one minute per minute of use Third hour two minutes per minute of use Fourth hour three minutes per minute of use Twenty-fourth hour twenty-three minutes per minute of use

Note that these rates apply for time used on any day (midnight to midnight), NOT used in a single session. A one hour session in the morning, followed by a two hour session in the evening, will cost FOUR hours time. A four hour session from 10.00pm one evening to 2.00am the next morning will cost only four hours, provided you do not otherwise use TIP on either day.

Usage rates of TIP will be closely monitored to ensure that service levels do not deteriorate as a result of this decision.

IPMC, September 1997.

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