Re: Your spreadsheet experiences

In addition to Excel (since early 90's), I've use VisiCalc, MultiPlan, a 
late 1980's mainframe spreadsheet, and have limited experience with 
Lotus, Quatro, Works Spreadsheet, and a few share-ware/free-ware 
spreadsheets.

I think that Excel is very easy for a new user to pick up with little or 
no instruction, yet powerful enough to be useful for power users.  My 
main frustration is the way that MS has historically ignored the 
shortcomings of its algorithms in probability, statistics, and math 
functions.  Excel 2003 has greatly improved the statistics functions.  I 
am underwhelmed by the Excel 2003 improvements to probability functions, 
but I fear that they think it was all that was needed.

Jerry

gswork wrote:

> Just interested in your spreadsheet experiences, opinions and so on.
>
> I've used visicalc (just for fun - it was obsolete when i used it),
> Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS and some clones, then Excel 5 for Win 3.1, Lotus
> for Win 95 and since then Excel 95/97/2000/xp.   Elswhere i've used
> gnumeric, kspread and a couple of other open source spreadsheets.
>
> I hear Quattro is pretty good, i've no experience of it.
>
> There's not much traffic on this group - perhaps because Excel is so
> all pervasive now (and, IMO, it is really good - but not so good it
> deserves to be the *only* one!).
>
> The group's faq is a good resource, thanks to author/s.
>
> Anyone tried programming a spreadsheet ( as in developing one, not
> using a macro language )?  If you've used Turbo C (ver 3 IIRC) you
> might have played with that example project, which yields a useful
> little spreadsheet!