|UTHE ADVANTAGE|U BY DANIEL MARTIN |UBORED WITH SPREADSHEETS|U There is, of course, the old saying about the shoemaker's children going barefoot. Relevant here because I am an accountant by education and by trade. My job includes hours of work on fiscal analysis, projections, cash flows, and the like. But I don't particularly like spreadsheets since I fell in love with data bases a while back. Data bases fill my needs much better, much more efficiently, much more effectively than spreadsheets because I deal with millions of dollars in a lot of accounts. A lot of people don't do their jobs the same way I do, and, of course, their jobs are different, with different concerns. Consequently, vanilla-flavored as they are to me, spreadsheets are the bread-and-butter of many accountants (and others who track dollars) and rank among the most-used and most-demanded software for personal computers. Amigoids everywhere in the United States were elated with the first well-done "Computer Chronicles" show which dealt exclusively with the Amiga 3000. Stewart Cheifet (the "Computer Chronicles" host) mentioned at the top of the show that the Amiga is a "mainstream" business computer in some countries in Europe, particulary Germany, but that it just hadn't caught on that way in the U.S.. And the show went on. Mr. Wallace doing AmigaVision, a couple of NewTek dudes doing the VideoToaster, and a Disney Studios' staffer showing off their slick, new animation program. There was also a field trip to Hewlett - Packard, where one of their people used an Amiga to create presentations for training. Close, but no cigar. If I am ever to see an Amiga on my desk, it will need to do the traditional, vanilla, productivity thingies: data bases, word processing, spreadsheets. If my boss came in my office and saw me doing Pluto animations, I would be in a world of hurt. Hence, I looked at "The Advantage", version 1.1, from the Canadian-based software company, Gold Disk. |UIN THE MAINSTREAM FLOW ?|U Hold on, now ! I'm not suggesting that "The Advantage" could carry the Amiga into the "mainstream". Probably the only spreadsheet that could have even a snowball's chance of doing that is Lotus 1-2-3. But it is important for the Amiga to have a credible tool for fiscal and financial analysis AND, dare I say it, be Lotus-compatible. Some products have claimed this feature, and I have used a few of them. I was not happy with the results. Flukey things would happen, maybe due to my carelessness, maybe due to software problems. I don't know, maybe you have had similar experiences. |UMY FOCUS|U The following is a brief walk-through of the salient features of "The Advantage" and the results of some tests I did to verify what is for me the most crucial feature of "The Advantage", the claimed Lotus compatibility. You see, I am one of many Amiga "schizos", an IBM at work, an Amiga at home. It is, thus, critical for me, and I think many of you, to see if I could use files created at home or at work interchangeably. |UA GLANCE AROUND|U The Advantage is a two disk set, the first, a bootable disk containing the program and the other, example files and smaller versions of the spreadsheet program (called Calc) and the graph program (called Graph) for those users who are RAM-deprived. The Advantage Project Menu shows you that you can import three different types of files: Advantage, MaxiPlan, and Lotus. You can save files in Advantage or Lotus formats. Well, why not ? This feature allows you to still use those MaxiPlan files you created but provides you with the incentive to sell your copy. Moving over, you run into the standard Cut-Copy-Paste functions in the Edit Menu with the exception that the "Paste" function gives you three choices: to place the full value of the copied cell in the new cell, just the value in the new cell, or to paste the value of the cell relatively. The Edit Menu also contains a very interesting selection called "Paste Function" which allows you to paste mathematical functions in cells rather than typing them out. The functions mentioned above, which are numerous in The Advantage, are the equivelants of the "@" functions found in Lotus 1-2-3. Also, featured in the Edit Menu, are the standard necessities for inserting, deleting, moving, and blanking ranges of one or more cells. For me, one of the handiest items available is the "Fill" selection. The "Fill" selection enables you to copy the contents of one cell to a columnar range (Fill-Down) or to a row range (Fill-Right). Indeed, one of the key combinations I use the most in The Advantage is the "Shift" key in conjunction with the cursor keys to mark ranges rapidly. Finally, you can cut and paste to and from the Amiga Clipboard, allowing you to snap displays and numbers in and out of The Advantage and any other applicatons you might be working with. The Format Menu provides the standard fare of formatting choices for cells (e.g., General, Scientific, Date) with a few "Amigatized" variations. You can spruce up your spreadsheets by changing the pen color, either globally or for a selected range of cells, and by formatting cells to display in plain, bold, italic, or underlined text or numbers. Of necessity, there is an alignment selection (right, centered, or left) which you can use to give your spreadsheets that clean professional look. Possibly the most intriguing selection is the "Boolean" format, not used by me, but ripe with possibilities. Moving over, the next menu is the Options Menu, which includes choices for such things as column-width, freezing and un-freezing rows or columns, palette (to set your worksheet colors), and preferences. I found the preferences particularly interesting. You select in the window that pops up the default direction of cell movement after a carriage return, whether or not you would like a grid to be overlaid or not, if you would like to hear your Ami speak the contents of cells as you input them (Say), and whether or not you would like ARexx active. You may also choose the form of calculation (row or column) and whether or not calculations are to be automatic or prompted. The Commands Menu sports the "Recalculate" function for those who choose not to have recalculations done automatically, the "GoTo Cell" command, very important for large spreadsheets. Two other selections are of particular note: the "Cell Note" and "New Chart" selections. The "Cell Note" selection is a very nice productive feature. It enables you to create and later edit notes you might want to leave to yourself regarding some particlular point worth remembering about that particular cell. So, if you were using The Advantage to reconcile your checkbook, for example, you might want to put a note in a cell for an outstanding check that you were guessing at the amount or the payee since you failed to note them properly in your checkbook. (Am I the only one who does this ?) Maybe one of the most exciting features of The Advantage is contained in the "New CHart" selection. After first selecting a range of cells to use to construct a chart, you are presented with a window in which to click on your choice of chart type (e.g., Pie, 3D Pie, Vertical Bar, etc.) all displayed in the colors of your choice. Nice, but not original. What is great is the formats in which you can save your charts. They may be saved as IFF, CAD, or Structured Drawings. As an ex-Newsletter Editor and hack at using Gold Disk's desktop publishing program, Professional Page, this provides tremendous potential for using graphs created in The Advantage in published documents. Indeed, I believe that PageStream 2.1 now is enabled to import Structured Drawings as well. There are two other menues in The Advantage which I will name here but not go into detail on: the Data Base and Macros Menues. The former because I find it personally difficult, after using relational data bases for so long ,to use spreadsheets as data bases. The latter, because as a non-power user of spreadsheets, I am totally inept at creating and using macros. Also, the Macros Memu includes the selection for the ARexx link in The Advantage and I am not literate in ARexx. However, our Vice-President, Larry Moonan, is working on his own review of The Advantage, in which he will take a different slant and focus, and in which he will cover these menues in more detail than I could. Look for Larry's review shortly. |UTHE BIG BLUE LINK|U Let me say here that my theory on working at home is quite clear and ,most likely, just a little bit self-serving. Stated simply, if I need to do work for my occupation, for my job, I would just as soon be in my office, swiveling from my AT, which contains my data bases, and my PS/2, which I use for terminal emulation, word processing, DTP, and a few other things that I can squeeze onto the lousy 20 Meg hard drive that comes standard with the Model 50. And, when my peers at work would ask why I hadn't gotten an MS-DOS machine for home, as they had, I would respond that I wouldn't want my work computers at home, let them stay where they are. But events often wear the best of us down, like the time last winter when I had pneumonia and couldn't take time off because we were so busy. Not that I was ready for an iron lung, but it would have been nice to sleep in and do some of the stuff at home as I had my strength. So I made some purchases. First, in my opinion, one of the greatest little utilities written for the Amiga, CrossDos. This allowed me to format disks on my Amiga, bring them to work, drop Lotus files on them, or some text edited stuff, and bring them home for polishing. Then I bought a new 2400 baud Supra for home, and dragged my old Avatex 1200 to work and hung it off the PS/2. Then, running the MS-DOS telecommunications program "Procomm Plus" in Host Mode, I could call into my PC at work and download and upload files to my heart's content. But, as mentioned above, I was not happy with the "compatibility" of the two spreadsheets I owned with Lotus. And then came The Advantage 1.1. I decided to run some tests before I fully proclaimed the virtues of this product, particularly in view of the debacle with it's original release. Therefore, I first worked just with the program itself, checking it for ease of use. It is very easy to use, particularly as you become familiar with the numerous keyboard shortcuts it includes. I tried to crash it, no luck, although I'm sure I could have done so if I really went nutso. But the purpose was to try to simulate a normal "goof up" crash, not a bombardment. Satisfied, I went on to the guts of my tests. I converted Advantage files to Lotus, uploaded them to my PC at work, altered them in Lotus, and shipped them back down to home. No problems. Then, I converted some Maxiplan spreadsheets to Lotus in The Advantage, shipped them to the PC and brought them in: no problems. I even brought them into a shareware Lotus-clone for the MS-DOS world called "AsEasyAs". They worked. Then I shipped Lotus files to the home front, brought them into The Advantage, altered them and shipped them back. Keine Problemen. Finally, I took a 365K file converted from a Honeywell mainframe to an ASCII file, imported it into Lotus, converted it to a Lotus spreadsheet, and shipped it home via the phone lines. I grabbed the Brass Ring: no problems. ( Except, of course, I was beginning to wonder whether I was carrying this thing too far.) Everything worked with the possible exception of one little annoyance: I noticed that when I had changed column widths in either Lotus or The Advantage to be longer than the standared 9 per cell, that when brought into the other program, they needed to be adjusted because they always reverted back to the default length of 9. A minor annoyance. ( And, for the rest of you CrossDOS owners, it worked just fine with this little guy, too !) I proclaim The Advantage to be pretty neat for doing some Lotus-type stuff on the home front if necessary. It works great, it looks great, it appears to be bug-free. And it now has 14 digit precision. The Advantage documentation admits to not being 100 % Lotus compatible. Some features, such as "look ups", will not be portable from Lotus to the The Advantage. Larry Moonan, who will be doing an additional write-up of The Advantage in the near future, has told me that there have been some rumblings on BIX about the small version of The Advantage which is contained on the Examples disk and is called "Calc". I did not use "Calc" and cannot either confirm or dispute these rumors. The Advantage sells for a suggested retail price of $ 169.00.