Windows? What Windows? We were using Excel on the Mac when PC users were still laughing at our ‘mice’.
I’m no cheerleader for Microsoft (trust me on that), but Excel was actually one quite nice app. It was powerful, intuitive (rare for MS), and, within the confines of “well no they didn’t invent the spreadsheet”, innovative. When creating a formula, you could just drag across a range of cells to specify them.
:eek:
Care to help me on a walk-through?
Lotus 123 DOS Release 2.2 versus Excel Mac ver. 2.2, fair enough?
I set up my data (simple array of 3 columns and 3 rows of numbers, nothing fancy). In Lotus, I hit the slash key to bring up the menus. Arrow arrow arrow arrow arrow arrow to select Graph to get started. Well, it does indeed have a lot of options. I start with setting the Type (hit return, confirm “Line”, go to “Quit” to tell it I’m finished setting the type). Now to set the data ranges. Select “X”. Hit return. I’m back at the spreadsheet. Type in start value, “…” end value. Or it can be done with the arrow keys and the spacebar. Now to set the “A” column of data. Arrow over to “A” and repeat the process of entering start value and end value. Repeat again for “B”, and so on.
Can I see what I’ve got so far, before I add titles and legends and whatnot? Arrow over to View and hit return. The explanatory bit under the menu says “View the current graph”, yeah, that’s what I wanna do, but nothing’s happening. WTF? Can you help me out here? I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong?!@?
Let’s try it in Excel. Enter same simple data, go to File:New, and I get this dialog, I select “Chart” and hit “OK”. Bang, I’ve got a chart!. It didn’t ask me about ranges because I had selected the range I wanted for datasource beforehand (whatever the active cells were). But I didn’t specify a chart type, what if it was the wrong kind? Gallery menu lets me switch types. How about legends and titles and all that stuff? Chart menu gives me those choices. And if I double-click the chart itself, I get more graphical formatting choices.
Now, perhaps this is profoundly unfair: I know my way around Excel because I used it all the time (and still do); it’s a bit of a step back from the version I use on my G4 PowerBook these days, but I relied on Excel 2.2 on my little SE back when I was a college student, pasting those elegant little charts and spreadsheets right into my term papers (Command-C, Command-V, baby!). Whereas I might not be floundering in Lotus 123 if I’d actually been a user of it in the day.
So would you care to demonstrate it ease, power, and intuitiveness, a task I’m evidently not up for here?