Re: Your spreadsheet experiences

"gswork" wrote...
>Just interested in your spreadsheet experiences, opinions and so on.

Started out using the spreadsheet in Lotus Symphony (1.0 through 1.2). Then went
on to use (in no particular order) VP-Planner (1 through 3), Lotus 123 (2.01,
3.0 through 3.3, v1 for Windows [yuck!], 4fW, 5fW, 97, and now 9.7 - plus
briefly the mainframe version in the late 1980s), 20/20 (also briefly on the
same mainframe), Quattro Pro (1 through 3 for DOS, 5fW, 9 for Linux, and 10fW),
Excel (2fW through 2K), StarOffice/OpenOffice Calc (5.0 through OOo 1.1, under
both Windows and Linux), gnumeric (from whatever came with Red Hat 6.0 through
1.1x), Xess (4.1 Standard), Applixware Spreadsheet, siag (don't recall the
versions), and dabbled in various versions of sc and several free/share-ware
ones. Then there's the [horrible] spreadsheet control provided by Formula One -
provides most of the functionality of Excel, just not the fun stuff.

Of all of these, Xess is the most solid. I've crashed everything else at one
time or another, but never Xess. That's probably unfair to gnumeric now - I
haven't upgraded to the latest stable version in over a year.

For character mode, Symphony's spreadsheet had the most UI functionality because
of the windowing features it provided that 123 *still* doesn't match, but I used
VP-Planner when I wanted results rather than eye wash.

For Windows, Excel is good. More fun to use than 123, but that's not because it
provides more features - more because there's always something new (and
nonobvious) to discover (makes one wonder if Excel's programmers are aware of
most of these). Generally, 123 does a better job with numerical accuracy and
recalc speed, but Excel offers array formula fun. Quattro Pro doesn't have the
polish of either of the other two. StarOffice/OpenOffice would be up there if
they provided documentation for macro programming as part of the distribution.
As it is, SO/OO is more Works on steroids than a complete replacement for
Office, but most people don't need Office.

>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!

Way back I added a few extra functions to the Minicalc that came with Turbo
Pascal. Recently I've gone through parts of the gnumeric source tree, but never
done more than tweaked some worksheet functions.

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