ProCalc Review MaxiPlan 4 v. ProCalc by Don Sutton Ed: Here is another of the very thorough reviews we have become used to from Don. He comes down definitely on the side of ProCalc, for many reasons.  ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ This review is by way of a comparison between Maxiplan 4 and ProCalc. I decided on this format as they are aimed at the same market and are both written for the Amiga and not ports of spreadsheet programmes from other platforms. Read the review of Maxiplan 4 in Megadisc 30 for the overview of Maxiplan. Overview ProCalc: ----------------- Gold Disk are relatively new to Spreadsheet programmes for the Amiga. Their first attempt was Advantage, quite good but prone to a few strange bugs. With the benefit of hindsight some of these problems may be to do with low hardware specification computers as I have found both Maxiplan & Advantage less bug-prone now that I have an accelerated Amiga with 4megs of 32bit memory via a GVP "Combo" board. This does not let the authors of the software off the hook however as if the programme is advertised to run on a standard Amiga it should run on a standard Amiga without problems. Recently Gold Disk have released another Spreadsheet programme aimed at the serious user/higher end of the market, called Professional Calc. It is written by Michal Todrovic, who also wrote Advantage. Professional Calc hereinafter is referred to as ProCalc to help eliminate RSI & save on disk space. This programme features Amiga font support, an Icon bar for single mouse button click on commonly used functions, 68881/2 floating point co-processor support and more. Users of spreadsheet programmes for the MS-DOS world will see a similarity with Borlands Quatro Pro, Microsoft Excel & Lotus 123 for Windows. When I first started writing about spreadsheets for the Amiga, the Amiga spreadsheet programmes were generally better as far as features go than their MS-DOS counterparts with the exception of Microsoft Excel. This is not the case in today's market. MS-DOS programmes though, as always, are much more expensive. ProCalc comes on three disks though there is a fourth disk in the packet with a Hyperbook demo of other Gold Disk products. Disk 1 contains the program and an installation programme for hard drive users. Disk 2 contains utilities & fonts for use with postscript laser printers. The 3rd disk contains example spreadsheets and templates for business, home & law use. It took me two attempts to install the programme on the hard drive even though I read the readme file on the disk, caused by operator stupidity. You see I failed to realise that if you want Procalc to be installed in a directory off the root directory do not create this directory first as you will end up with a directory structure as follows DH1:Procalc/Procalc/ instead of DH1:Procalc/. The procedure is:- Hold down the shift key, click once on the HDInstall icon and double click the drive icon and not a drawer icon as stated in the readme file unless you want Procalc installed in a drawer say DH1:Spreadsheets/ProCalc/. Aesthetics ---------- No contest here, ProCalc wins hands down. Maxiplan under Workbench 1.3 looks OK but under Workbench 2.0 is poor mainly caused by the colouring changes under WB 2.0. This renders the gadgets less distinct. ProCalc fully supports WB 2.0 sculpted Icons and 3D look. The depth of the rows is dependent on the font size used so you can have a large title or headings for columns and a smaller size for the data - an excellent feature. Also liked by the reviewer is the Icon bar/Tool bar/Gadget bar (call it what you will) for commonly used functions, called the Control Panel by Gold Disk. This control panel is located above the worksheet area. These are grouped as follows - Style (a number of styles or text attributes can be given names and applied to a worksheet via this gadget) Text Style (Italics, Bold, Underline & Plain) Font (Select an Amiga font from a requester) Alignment (Left, Right & Centred) Colour (Current colour, several icons of different colours depending on number of colours set in defaults) Editing (Cut, Copy, Paste & Function) Graph (brings up a chart requester providing a data range has been selected) Macro (Execute recorded macros - in this case recorded keystrokes or mouse clicks) Rexx (a Scripted macro function using Rexx or ARexx. The latter ARexx scripting programming language is supplied with the WB 2.0 upgrade or is available separately for approx $70.00). Maxiplan also has gadgets in the control area above the worksheet and these have not changed since version 1.9, the oldest version I have. Maxiplan's gadgets are as follows - (All gadgets except the "F()" and "Name" duplicate the respective keyboard keys) ESC, =, +, -, *, /, F() (Brings up a scrollable function requester), Name (Paste a name of a cell or range into a formula), <- (Return key), (, ), ., 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Only two of these ever get used by me and these are the Function & Paste Name gadgets. All the rest are of dubious value being there and gadgets that do something useful would be preferred. Documentation & Online Help --------------------------- The manual for Maxiplan has been re-written at least from the version supplied with Maxiplan 1.9 sold by Oxxi. A discernible improvement has been made particularly for the new user. A little more could be done however in the area of indexing. Maxiplan has online help available from the last option from each pull down menu. Pressing the help key will produce a list of function key actions. Earlier versions of Maxiplan had a reference in the help screen to the appropriate section in the manual. ProCalc on the other hand has no online help though the manual is much better than Maxiplan's with copious illustrations. Using ----- Maxiplan is quite fast but ProCalc is faster courtesy of the minimum recalc feature and floating point processor support if you have one fitted. Minimum recalc is a feature whereby only those cells affected by a change are recalculated instead of every cell. With the introduction of Workbench 2.0 a change was made to the front/back gadgets. The left one was changed to a "zoom" gadget or "shrink/expand" if you like where if you click on it the window will shrink to a minimum size and if clicked again the window will assume its normal size. This feature is supported by ProCalc but not Maxiplan. The front/back gadget is partially supported by Maxiplan. Where more than one worksheet is loaded you can swap between worksheets but not between other programmes unless you select Open Workbench from the Project menu. If you don't have much memory then Maxiplan's workbench close down will help.  Memory handling While on the subject of memory Maxiplan handles low memory situations better than ProCalc. Maxiplan issues a warning while ProCalc is liable to lock up. Often when entering large amounts of data you need to know what column or row you are entering the data, ie. you may have labels in the first 2 or 3 rows of the worksheet. Once you get to the bottom of the screen these titles will scroll off the top. Most spreadsheet programmers acknowledge this and provide a feature whereby several rows & or columns can be frozen so as to remain at the left in the case of columns and at the top in the case of rows and both if so desired. Maxiplan provides this feature where up to 8 rows and 5 columns can be frozen. I have found that you must not select more than this or you will have no alternative other than to reboot the computer. If you exceed the 8 row limit a requester comes up informing you of a software error but the mouse will no longer respond to cancel the requester and neither will the keyboard other than the Ctrl/LA/RA reset key combination. If you exceed the 5 column limit a recoverable alert appears but when continue is selected you find you are in a loop between a flashing alert and a glimpse of Maxiplan. Too bad if you haven't saved recently. Procalc on the other hand produces no errors when freezing rows or columns or both however it is practically useless as the limit is the first row and or column. You may get away satisfactorily with only one column but only one row? One would need to increase the width of the columns temporarily in order to enter a meaningful title to the column. An example is: A heading of "Vehicle Insurance" which would be set up in a worksheet as follows. A B C D E 1 Vehicle 2 Insurance 3 4 Would have to be set up in ProCalc as follows in order to read the title. A B 1 Vehicle Insurance 2 3 4 The column headings would have to be edited later and widths adjusted which is time consuming. Maxiplan has another feature by which you can enter data quickly, called "DataView". This in effect takes one row of a predefined database range and places each cell in the row down the screen making entry similar to a proper database where one record is viewed at a time. The title for each cell "Field" is displayed to the left and you enter the data alongside this to the right. This feature partially circumvents my earlier criticism of the titles feature. Maxiplan now supports more shortcut key commands. It would appear that the keys chosen were produced by an enigma machine - some examples: Page Right = Control S Page Left = Control A Page Down = Control F Page Up = Control D Surely they could have used say Control U for page up or Control and up arrow. Tell me how did they arrive at the name of Intuitive Technologies? Another five demerits to Maxiplan for non-intuitive shortcut keys. While on the subject of keys Procalc supports the IBM AT keyboards features for the numeric keypad. Those keys on the numeric keypad that have commands printed on the front edge ie. the 7 key has home on the front of it and if you press this key the cursor will jump to cell A1. You can toggle these keys to be calculator or cursor keys by holding down the shift key while pressing the Num-L (number lock) key. This produces an indication on the status line that number lock is on or off. Unfortunately as soon as you move the cursor or press a key this indication disappears. This can make it a gamble when you want to page up or down as you don't know if you are going to enter something in a cell or move around the worksheet and vice versa. Liked on ProCalc is the ability to create and name styles. The left gadget on the command line or as I prefer to call it, "Icon bar" applies a style to the worksheet. The current style is displayed in the gadget to the right of the apply style gadget. Styles can be made up of attributes such as fonts, style of font eg. bold etc. & colour. This may be set up where you may have in one worksheet several fonts on different rows and save this as a style. When you have finished entering the data into the worksheet simply click on the icon and all the rows in the worksheet will adopt the predefined style. Maxiplan supports the standard system font but allows colour, attributes such as italic bold etc. but not different point sizes despite the fact that there is a "Paste Font" option from the Edit menu. The paste font option brings up a requester where you may choose a font but when you click on the continue button it inserts the name of the font you have selected into the cell. Both programmes allow notes to be attached to cells. In the case of Maxiplan the current cell indicator will adopt an italic style when the cursor is placed on a cell containing a cell note. Pressing the help key will display the note. The note may also be spoken. ProCalc cannot speak cell notes but they are displayed on the status line when the cursor is on the cell containing the note. The say option in ProCalc will speak the cell contents back to you when you complete an entry. ProCalc allows a hotlink to an ASCII text editor for extended cell notes and works best with Transwrite, another Gold Disk product. Functions/If statements ----------------------- ProCalc supports many Lotus 123 functions and where there is no equivalent ProCalc function a Lotus function may be used. An example is where you may want a solid line under a title. With both Maxiplan and ProCalc you must key in the number of dashes or underscores to fill the width of the column. If you later widen the column you then have to edit this cell and add more characters in order to fill the cell. The Lotus feature to automatically fill the cell even if the column width is altered is the back slash followed by the desired fill character eg. "\-". This feature will in fact fill every empty cell to the right. Patterns can also be achieved like the following "\-*". This will fill the cell -*-*-*-* and any empty cell to the right. To stop a line simply enter a space in the desired ending cell. Because ProCalc also supports Amiga fonts a font can be created with the desired symbol, character or shape and applied to the worksheet. See the font supplied called "Zapfdingbats". Another trick I found that also works in Maxiplan is to enter a space in one cell and apply the underline style to it. You may also have a heavier weighted line by selecting the bold attribute. Procalc and Maxiplan are similar in that the function which can be applied to a cell can be selected from a requester similar to a file requester. ProCalc has some 124 functions plus some which are unique to Lotus while Maxiplan has 66. The Lotus functions are not available from the function requester. Maxiplan's & ProCalc's functions use the ":" colon to separate cell references and the "=" to precede a formula like the MS-DOS and Apple Mac versions of Microsoft Excel. ProCalc also has the feature whereby you can define your own functions, save them and have them appear in the function requester. Some of ProCalc's functions are of dubious value ie. the time function with an accuracy of seconds when nothing more accurate than minutes can be displayed. Both programmes support links to specific cells in other worksheets via a link function. You can, for example, have a worksheet set up for each month of the year and a summary worksheet which takes the totals out of each months worksheet. Maxiplan does not support a text argument in IF functions so a cell with the following statement will not work though there is mention in the documentation that this feature is to be implemented in a future version. =IF(A2=B2,"Yes","No"). The preceding statement works fine with ProCalc. Overall ProCalc is stronger and more flexible in the Function department. File Save/Retrieve ------------------ Both ProCalc and Maxiplan have the ability to save in their native mode or save and retrieve Lotus 123 format. ProCalc will retrieve Maxiplan files. ProCalc can save as CSV (comma separated values) from the Edit/External menu option as well as paste to the clipboard. Graphing -------- Both programmes are well endowed with charting features. Types include bar, stacked bar, pie, line, scatter as well as 3D versions of most of them. The graphs can be annotated using any of the standard Amiga fonts. Both programs make it easy to create charts however new users to Maxiplan will take a while to come to grips with placing text on the graph. After selecting the font and entering the text it appears that nothing has happened until you click the left mouse button. Text will then appear to the right of the pointer position. Though this allows a lot of flexibility it will require some trial and error to place the text exactly where you want it. Graphs can be saved with a worksheet as named graphs with Maxiplan or as an active graph with ProCalc. Other forms in which ProCalc graphs can be saved are IFF, CAD or ProDraw (a structured drawing programme from Gold Disk, reviewed on MD31). Macros ------ Here Maxiplan wins hands down for native Macros and ProCalc wins for external macros. By this I mean that Maxiplan has an inbuilt Macro programming language which can both be recorded or typed into a separate worksheet called a "Macrosheet". These macrosheets can then be loaded and run on any worksheet or they can set up to work on a specific worksheet. ProCalc on the other hand has a keystroke/mouse button recorder and such macros are not able to make decisions based on user input or cell contents. Both Maxiplan and ProCalc support ARexx which is an external "Macro/Scripting" language. For casual home use macros are purely academic. Printing -------- Maxiplan allows the running of preferences to adjust printer settings directly from a menu option though most of the things you would need to change are available from the Printer or Project menu anyhow. Sideways or Landscape printing is not supported. Procalc supports Sideways, ASCII, Graphic or PostScript output to printers as well as the print to disk that Maxiplan also supports. ProCalc's print to disk is found in the Edit menu option "External". Two of Procalc's output options, sideways and graphic dump (both are graphic) are slow as the computer needs to build each line to be printed by determining which pins are to be fired. Maxiplan has an option to print grid lines which in effect double spaces the worksheet cells. Being an ASCII output and not graphic it is faster than ProCalc's graphic dump (the only way you can print grids with ProCalc). Maxiplan's grid printing feature would be OK if you could turn on or off cells that were to have a grid surrounding them. There is no need to have a grid around titles for example and in fact if the title spills over into an adjacent cell to the right it will be truncated if print grid is selected. Conclusion ---------- Maxiplan, long the leader in Amiga spreadsheet programmes has made some improvements with features but has not really addressed some underlying fundamental bugs ie. the tendency to Guru. For a programme that has been around for so long and to not do something about these problems is in my opinion unforgivable. Some of the good features are the "Dataview" mode for quick entry of information into a spreadsheet database and the built in macro language though the latter would not get much use for home. ProCalc on the other hand for such a newcomer is very good. I did not have any problems with it at all. In fact if I had a wish list for ProCalc, it would be for Gold Disk to address the freeze titles limitation. This would make it the ultimate Amiga spreadsheet. I have no hesitation in recommending ProCalc to any one.  ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[