With Quattro Pro Ver-BBBB sion 4.0, Borland In-W W temational has delivered an emphatic message to its installed user base. Although intent on making a dramatic splash in the Windows spreadsheet market, the company has no plans to abandon its DOS users. The newest Quattro Pro ($750) is the most extensive revision for Borland’s character-based spreadsheet and provides welcome new analytic functionality, improved NetWare support, background printing and a host of other conveniences, including the annual enhancements to its presentation features.
The most visible change is probably also the least significant. In its WYSIWYG display mode, Quattro Pro now wears a mouse palette across the top of the screen, directly below the main menu. Like the Smarticons of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows (1-2-3/W), but unlike Microsoft Excel’s toolbar, the Borland palette can be tailored to give single-click access to commonly used commands. Two ‘speedbars’ are provided: one for Ready mode and one for Edit mode. In nonWYSIWYG displays, these palettes run vertically at the right edge of the display, replacing Version 3.0’s button bar.
Because the program’s
default speedbar includes a Sum button, Quattro Pro users — like Excel and 1-2-3/W users — can now create summation formulae for a whole block of columns or rows with a click of the mouse.
Quattro Pro is the only major spreadsheet package to offer bubble charts — x,y charts in which each point is surrounded by a circle scaled to reflect the point’s position on an additional data series. Much more important, the program now has ‘analytical graphing’ commands. With these, you can take a series of daily sales figures and quickly convert it into a series of monthly sums or averages. The aggregation period can be any interval, standard or arbitrary, and any of Quattro Pro’s statistical functions can be applied to the aggregated data. Unfortunately, there is no way to plot every nth point.
Other options let you automatically generate moving averages (weighted or unweighted) or plot the curve or line that best fits a scattergram. You can funnel the aggregated or transformed numbers into one of six graph series and plot them, either alone or alongside the original data. A Table command writes the transformed information onto the worksheet.
As if these were not enough good ideas, mouse users can perform graphing transformations with Zoom-and-Pan. This lets you magnify areas of interest (the axes are automatically rescaled, provided you haven’t assigned manual scaling) and turn the result into a separately named graph that you can print by itself or display in a slide show.
Another major addition to Quattro Pro’s analytic prowess is the Optimiser, an integrated version of Frontline Systems’ What-If Solver add-in for 1-2-3-(A similar version is bundled as an add-in with Excel 3-0.) Using linear and non-linear programming techniques, the Optimiser finds combinations of inputs that produce an optimal effect on a designated target cell while meeting specified constraints. The Optimiser replaces the linear-programming module that was supplied with Quattro Pro 3-0.
Programmers may now enhance built-in capabilities with user-defined functions. (A separately sold toolkit is required, and functions must be written in C or C++.) An addin kit of financial functions was not ready in time for this review but should be available in the third quarter. The kit, developed for Borland by Tech Hackers, includes 49 functions for complex date arithmetic, cash-flow analysis, amortisation and yield calculations, and probability analysis.
Like 1-2-3 Release 2.3, Quattro Pro 4.0 now includes an optional print spooler. To use it, you load a TSR from the DOS command line before invoking the spreadsheet. The TSR uses about 18K of memory, it spools print jobs to disk, and lets you monitor and manage its queue via a special window. NetWare users can also specify any network print queue as the default output device, and monitor and manage jobs spooled to that queue.
Important news for former Lotus 1-2-3 users and those who work in multivendor environments is Version 4.0’s support (import only) for the .ALL, .FM3, .FMT and .WK3 file formats. Multipage .WK3 files read into Version 4.0 are broken down into separate Quattro Pro worksheets (up to 32 pages), and formulae that transect pages are reconstructed using Quattro Pro’s linking syntax.
The translation of Allways, Impress and WYSIWYG files is not perfect. Formatting codes embedded in WYSIWYG labels turn to junk in Quattro Pro, WYSIWYG text fields are ignored, centred labels that spill left and right in Allways don’t in Quattro Pro, and fonts and rules don’t match as well as you might expect. Still, the support is good enough that you usually won’t have to recreate complex formatting from scratch.
The upgrade also offers on-the-fly font scaling using Bitstream technology, thereby eliminating the font-building delays that irritated users of earlier versions. Other publishing enhancements include support for named styles (you can use this feature to go beyond the eight-font limit of Version 3.0) and user-definable numeric formats. The latter let you display unit text beside numbers, force leading zeros, assign fill characters for cheque-writing purposes, identify dates by their weekday names, and more. Unfortunately, there’s still no way to build a scaling factor into a customised numeric format.
Among other improvements are block insertions and deletions (allowing macro writers to adjust code without trashing worksheet logic), sorting by column and copying formats separately from values.
On the performance side, nothing appears to have changed.
Requires: 512K of RAM (640K recommended), DOS 2.0 or
later (3.3 or later for LAN use) and 6M of hard disk space
