Excel Arrives on Windows

It was by no means clear, back in 1988, that Microsoft's dominance of the PC operating system market would be translatable into the application arena. Microsoft's original Multiplan 1982 spreadsheet had been more or less wiped out by Lotus 1-2-3. The graphical spreadsheet Excel, originally developed for the Mac in the mid '80s, gave Microsoft its chance to leapfrog Lotus.

A couple of things strike me straight away about this piece for "Which Computer?". The first is the sheer luxury of being able to write 2,000 words on a single software product in a printed magazine. Yup, you get that space on the Web these days, but print product reviews have shrunk to thumbnail sketches.

The second point is the nightmare of klugery we had to live with during that painful evolution from character-based to graphical screens. The hardware groaned under the burden. Drivers worked for some apps but not for others -- and as you'll see here, that went for fonts too.

You'll notice, too, that back in 1988 OS/2 is discussed in terms of being "the next Windows".


[EXCEL][wc?][jan 88][chb]

Early in October, Microsoft announced a new spreadsheet product, claimed to be the first to make use of the full power of 80286/80386-based computers. Microsoft says Excel can do more, looks better and can be more fully customised than any of its rivals.

None of this will come as a surprise to Macintosh users. Excel has been available in the Macintosh environment for a long time, and is the reason why many Apple devotees bought their machines in the first place.

The new version carries over the revolution to the world of the IBM PC, MSDOS, adding a number of enhancements on the way. Perhaps not to the whole of the MSDOS world, for only the up- market IBM PC AT end, with 80286 or 80386 processors and high- resolution graphics is properly equipped to make full use of the program.

But the bad news about Excel is that the Windows graphics interface makes heavy demands on the hardware. We were able to run the product on the Epson PC+ in a useable way, but the 8086 processor and the 80ms hard disk were clearly labouring. The chances are if your work demands Excel you're probably too busy to want to wait for sluggish hardware.

An 8MHz PC AT is our minimum recommendation and even then power users will need a little patience. Those who want to manipulate Excel with the speed of character-based Lotus 1-2-3 will probably need to invest in a 80386-based machine. Most of our trials were carried out on the excellent Dell 386 equipped with an EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adaptor) and 3MB of RAM.

The Windows interface makes possible several features not found in conventional spreadsheets. You work with a mouse, which with practice allows fast, precise positioning even when moving around the largest spreadsheet. The new version of Windows, as adapted to the needs of IBM's new software environment SAA (Systems Application Architecture) also makes it easy to manipulate the Windows interface from the keyboard.

Inside Excel you can operate on more than one sheet at the same time and save the list of sheets as a single file to ensure you can recall the precise mix next time you run the program. Not all the sheets are spreadsheets: the Windows interface caters for scaleable, multiple graphics sheets as well and some of your sheets may be exclusively reserved for macros (more of that later).

Thanks to the DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) feature of Windows, data can be moved easily between sheets, either by screen cut- and-paste, or under program control.

Excel will only run under Microsoft Windows 2.0 or Windows/386, so your existing version of Windows will need to be upgraded if you want to take advantage of the multi-tasking aspect of the product. Alternatively, you can use Excel with its own cut-down runtime version of Windows 2.0, but this will prevent you running other programs at the same time.

Incidentally, as Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 have exactly the "look and feel" of Microsoft's operating system OS/2 with the IBM interface Presentation Manager, finding your way around Excel is also an introduction to the next generation of computing, Microsoft style.

Or will be when the odd bugs are sorted out. At the time of writing, both Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 are in beta test (technical jargon for "Not Quite Ready").

This resulted in problems with the clipboard and some minor bugs in the way Windows/386 handles printers introduced slight glitches into the colour charts produced on our Oki Microline 393C colour printer.

We also came across an unpleasant interaction with Aldus' desktop publishing package Pagemaker. Windows supplies its own fonts, but can also take advantage of special character sets installed by the application programs it runs. Obviously, it should be able to administer these additional fonts without getting them mixed up, but the special fonts Aldus Pagemaker introduces on installation pre-empt the standard font set.

On our setup this resulted in a completely inappropriate display of Excel's "Help" pages, using tiny characters that were almost completely illegible.

The solution is to erase the Pagemaker fonts from the Windows directory, remembering to restore them again next time you want to run Pagemaker - hardly the synergistic applications environment promised us by the Windows and OS/2 publicity. We gather that Microsoft is on to this problem and future versions of Aldus Pagemaker will come with fonts that are properly behaved.

Over the course of six weeks we received several pre-launch versions of Excel. It is not unusual for beta copies to have bugs and these early versions of Excel were true to form in this respect. Following the formal launch of the product we received the full package with handsomely printed manuals and five disks, but the problems were by no means behind us. The disks and the package were marked "Preview Edition", which seems to indicate that at the time of writing the product is not yet in a finished state.

Evidently it had been put together in something of a hurry. At first we were unable to install it, until we discovered that two of the disks had their labels interchanged.

Probably the most important features for existing spreadsheet users is the compatiblity with Lotus 1-2-3. Many spreadsheet products claim this, but we don't know of any that delivers quite the degree of Lotus compatibility that Excel manages. Besides directly reading and writing WKS, WK1 and WRK (Symphony) files as if they were its native format, Excel also translates Lotus macros.

The result is an efficient bridge from Lotus to Excel to move your expertise out of the character-based world of 1-2-3 into the bright tomorrow of the graphics interface - although power users should not expect to carry their entire investment of spreadsheets over without a certain amount of tweaking.

An Excel macro works in much the same way as the equivalent in Lotus, but is structurally very different. Initially a simple way of emulating keyboard input from within the spreadsheet itself, so that repetitive series of similar actions could be carried out automatically, the concept of macros developed in version 2 of Lotus 1-2-3 into BASIC-like language in its own right that could be used to create menus, take "IF...ELSE" decisions and read and write files. With Symphony the same idea was extended to record keystrokes as they were entered, greatly simplifying some apects of macro creation.

Despite these second generation sophistications, there are two central problems with 1-2-3 and Symphony macros. To the extent that the language deals with the keystrokes themselves, rather than the actions those keystrokes trigger, it is hard to read and understand. And the program material is stored in the same spreadsheet as the data; it is all too easy to damage the macro while making interactive adjustments to the information it manipulates.

If data and program are stored in the spreadsheet side by side, however well distanced, the deletion of a data line also removes a line from the macro with potentially disastrous results.

Excel remedies both these problems very effectively. Excel macros, whether created directly from the keyboard by switching on the "Record" mode, or by writing them explicitly, are always stored in a separate special macro sheet. Several macros can be stored on a single sheet, to form a "macro library" that provides general purpose utilities or tailors Excel to your special needs. One key advantage over Lotus is that Excel macros are made up of English-like command words that should be more or less comprehensible to any reader, whether familiar with the intricacies of Excel or not.

The work of converting existing Lotus macros is done by a secondary program called the Macro Translation Assistant and, as the name implies, it doesn't do the whole job unaided. Straightforward keystroke macros will translate directly, but others may present problems. Lotus 1-2-3 allows you to create macros that edit or write formulae, or modify themselves as they run, although this is not particularly good programming practice. Excel has trouble coping with these, as it does with macros that use Lotus commands like "{MenuBranch}" or "{Pause}" for which it has no direct equivalents. Large Lotus 1-2-3 macros are also liable to create problems.

To call up the Macro Translation Assistant you evoke "Run" from the main Windows bar in the top left hand corner of the Excel window, the option used to activate programs external to Excel. The design of the Macro Translator seems to suggest that eventually Microsoft will be adding modules to translate macros from spreadsheets other than Lotus, but currently only Lotus 1-2- 3 translation is available.

A menu lets you choose which of the currently active spreadsheets you want to operate on, and then provides you with a list of named areas within the Lotus sheet so that you can choose your macro.

The Macro Translation Assistant then leaps into action, converting your macro and automatically copying the result to a new macro sheet. In order to work it requires a second macro sheet called "Trans123.xlm" and there is a risk of running into mysterious difficulties if Excel is unable to find this in the currently selected directory.

Excel comes with a built-in tutorial, complete with graphics illustrations and for Lotus users a special "1-2-3 Help" facility (there's similar help for MultiPlan devotees). Excel can't deal with Lotus commands directly, but if you type a familiar 1-2-3 sequence into the special Lotus Help box the program displays the corresponding section in the Microsoft Excel help file.

For example, if you enter "/FR", the Lotus key sequence to retrieve a new file, Excel responds by showing you the help page that shows you how to choose the "File Open" command from the menu bar. Ideally, Excel should be able to cope with Lotus key sequences directly but the arrangement certainly helps to level out the learning curve.

When it comes to the creation of graphics, Excel really shows its power. The 44 types of charts produced are configurable inside the program, so that you can, for instance, alter the colour or patterning of an individual bar in a bar chart, lift out the slice of a pie by moving it with the mouse pointer, or add arrows to any part of the picture. Text can either be attached to specific parts of the chart, or entered free-hand.

Creating a chart could hardly be easier. If you highlight a range of numbers immediately before opening a new chart sheet, the highlighted figures are automatically entered and a chart is built instantly. The type of the chart depends on the default you have chosen, but you can change this by selecting a different type from the "Gallery". Charts are dynamically linked to the spreadsheets that contain their data, so if you subsequently change the spreadsheet figures, the chart will alter accordingly.

In theory, you should be able to transfer the chart into other Windows graphics packages like InaVision by cutting and pasting through the Clipboard, but both the run-time and our beta test 386 version of Windows were not up to this. Running under Windows/386, the Clipboard presented the message "Not Enough Memory" on the 3MB Dell and refused to allow us to proceed, or go back to Excel. The only recourse was to reboot the machine.

Function for function, Excel may not appear to be overwhelmingly more powerful than 1-2-3, but there are some subtle variations that in practice make a great deal of difference. For instance, like its predecessor on the Macintosh, Excel can deal with arrays, rectangular groups of cells that share the same formula. This is not the same as copying a formula to a named group of cells, which results in a variant of the formula being inserted into every cell in the range.

Using arrays, a single formula can be used, for example, to add one range of cells to another and put the results in a third range. Apart from speeding calculations and reducing the amount of memory used by your worksheet, array formulae can greatly clarify the logic of your model.


Verdict

* Microsoft Excel is justifiably heralded as "the new generation of spreadsheet software". It is genuinely innovative, powerful and easy to use; used with the appropriate output devices it can produce stunning hard copy of both spreadsheets and graphics.

* Its macro system is a tremendous improvement on Lotus 1-2-3, making it easy to develop applications within the Excel environment. Thanks to DDE these can be "real time"; that is to say, can be made to respond to changes in external data (like stock prices) as it happens.

* The software is still not complete and the full system will not be available until the underlying Windows interface is fully developed.

* Users of 8088 and 8086-based machines will be able to run Excel, but only the most patient will judge its performance satisfactory. The product really requires a PC AT, and preferably a 80386-based machine equipped with a fast (35ms and upwards) hard disk.