19 Oct
2011
19 Oct
'11
9:54 p.m.
On 10/19/11 18:54, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
you're kidding right?
excel is a joke. 1-2-3 was much better,
quattro was even better
sadly both have been crushed by monopoly of m$
is quattro old enough to be considered classic computing yet? :)
My favorite spreadsheet was Mesa2, which was originally written for
NextStep by Athena Design, but was ported to OS/2 in the mid-90s. I never
used Excel, and didn't know its limitations until I had to do a project
transferring 100K+ records from a VSAM file on a mainframe to an Excel file
for a client to access on a PC. It was easy to do in Mesa2. I built the
file of over 100K records and saved it in Excel format per the client
request. But they couldn't read it because Microsoft had a 64K record
limit at the time. I had to split the file, which was stupid, but at the
time the only spreadsheet I knew of that could handle it was Mesa 2. But
it is a windows world and people will just accept anything Microsoft
dictates. I heard that eventually Microsoft upped the number of records
excel could handle, but it by then it was way past when the client needed it.
Mark