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Reprinted from Byte 11/1989, pp. 81. OS/2 Gets a Spreadsheet The new Excel, an upgrade to the powerful spreadsheet, joins the OS/2 bandwagon. After testing a prerelease version, I came to the conclusion that Excel for OS/2 with Presentation Manager is distinguished from its DOS ancestor less by its feature set than by the underlying benefits of OS/2.
However, operating in single-user mode on an AT-class machine, and without many other PM applications with which to share data, the advantages of OS/2 are not immediately apparent. In fact, even the larger memory addressing (I had 3 megabytes installed, plus room on my disk for virtual memory) didn’t prevent me from getting warning messages that some of my operations were too big and would require giving up Undo in order to proceed. Excel for Windows is a fine application, distinguished by its graphical power and, through Windows, its ability to link spreadsheets to one another and to other documents. The PM version carries on this tradition, adding support for up to 256 fonts (in both a faster, less-accurate screen mode and a slower but more WYSIWYG representation) and a new Data Consolidate feature that emulates the three-dimensional capabilities that are found in competing spreadsheets. The new Excel doesn’t permit a single file to contain multiple worksheets, as does Lotus 1-2-3 release 3.0. However, with Data Consolidate, you can “summarize” worksheets by pointing and clicking on areas in each sheet that are then dynamically linked to a summary sheet. To my disappointment, this feature was not intuitive nor well documented.
Other additions in Excel PM are quite minor. A nice menu item called Window Show Clipboard lets you see the contents of the clipboard, and modifications to existing commands permit greater customization of the work environment. New commands necessary to interact with OS/2 (e.g., a menu item to call the Control Task Manager) have been added, while several macro functions have been modified to comply with PM. The file load and save commands will support the 32-character filenames in OS/2 1.2. And Q+E, Microsoft’s new SQL querying tool for Excel, will ship with every copy of the PM version. In performance, the beta version of Excel PM that I tested was comparable to the Windows version in recalculations – sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but never by more than 10 percent – but its speed was substantially slower in two key areas: file loading and saving, and screen movement. Loading a 600K-byte file under OS/2 took 70 percent longer than under Windows, and a test of scrolling right took 31 percent longer. In all comparable benchmarks, Excel PM was much slower than the 2.x DOS versions of Lotus 1-2-3 (using the same files converted to .XLS format) and was a little slower than Lotus 1-2-3 release 3.0. Is Excel PM worth it for DOS/Windows users looking to upgrade? When you consider that you will need an 80286 machine or higher (an 80386 really helps), at least 2.5 megabytes of RAM, a large hard disk drive with 12 megabytes of free space, OS/2, and the application itself, the cost may not be justified now. But when OS/2 becomes a standard, and more applications that use multitasking and DDE enter the market, this new Excel will likely be a must-have program. | |||
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