A bright new face on an old friend: Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.1 - Software Review - evaluation

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1991 by Corey Sandler

Also, Ventura and Qume Make Managing information EASY A Bright New Face on An Old Friend Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.1 Rating: * * * AT A GLANCE: Familiar Lotus spreadsheet with new graphical face. WYSIWYG representation of fonts, graphics, colors. DOCUMENTATION: Very well written, but poorly indexed. ERROR HANDLING: Performed well; no problems encountered. EASE OF USE: Excellent-those familiar with previous 1-2-3 versions will find all old commands still there. VALUE: Pricey, but as always, very good. SUPPORT: Toll-free, 24 hours, seven days for six months; after six months, toll call or unlimited toll-free calls for $49 (8:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. weekdays) or $79 (24 hours, seven days) per year. VERSION REVIEWED: 3.1 PRICE: $595 (network version, $795) SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 1MB IBM compatible (80286 or better); hard-disk drive (with 5MB available); EGA, VGA, Hercules; mouse optional; DOS 3.0 or higher; 5.25- or 3.5-inch PUBLISHER: Lotus Development Corp., 55 Cambridge Pkwy., Cambridge, MA 02142; (617) 5778500, (800) 343-5414 Release 3.1 gives a welcome new look and feel to the venerable Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and it's about time. In the fall of 1989, after several years of a much-anticipated (and somewhat delayed) appearance, Lotus Development brought forth not one, but two new offspring.

These nonidentical twins were Release 2.2, for memory-constrained PC-XT and low-end PC-AT class machines, and Release 3.0, a fuller-featured version aimed at the developing 80386 market and beyond.

Release 3.0 brought 3-D" to 1-2-3, which let people view portions of up to three spreadsheets simultaneously. The large program was able to work with-and, in fact, required-extended memory beyond 640K. But it wasn't the good old text-based 1-2-3, a product that performed like a solid, dependable Chevy in a world of flashy, sexy Porsches. The racier spreadsheets, led by Microsoft's Excel and Borland's Quattro, used color, representations of various typefaces, and other graphics elements on-screen and in printouts.

Lotus offered some of that graphics pizazz with Release 2.2. It included a graphics utility called Allways that operated as a separate "spreadsheet-publishing" program. However, you couldn't do any data entry or editing without switching back to the standard 1-2-3 text screen.

Notwithstanding Lotus's proclamations at the time, vast numbers of people did not migrate to Release 3.0; in fact, throughout most of 1990, Release 2.2 outsold its new sibling by an estimated 4 to I ratio.

All this may (and perhaps should) change with the debut of Release 3. 1. You know that something is different when a splash of color and graphics replaces the familiar dull monochrome 1-2-3 opening screen of all of the previous Lotus offerings. What we have now is something almost completely different, a true graphical spreadsheet with a good user interface and lots of new features.

Lotus has achieved a pretty big feat here, once again taking unto itself the work of a third-party programmer and melding it with 1-2-3. In this case, the new graphical facilities of Release 3.1 are derived from its Impress add-in. With Impress running over 1-23 you can do all your spreadsheet design, modification, and data entry in the graphical mode, which is a clear improvement over Release 2.2 with Allways. The addition of the Impress technology also brings mouse support to 1-2-3 for the first time.

Other improved graphics functions include text formatting, direct PostScript printer support with Bitstream fonts, and automatic print compression. You can specify manual or automatic compression to get as much of a spreadsheet as possible to print on a single page, and the program does a good job of maintaining ratios in graphs and other spreadsheet elements.

View graphs and data together on the screen; or wrap text and numbers around a graph on your page. Graphs can be linked so that a change in a number on the spreadsheet is immediately seen in the displayed graph. Release 3.1 also offers a freehand drawing capability, permitting the addition of circles, boxes, and lines.

Lotus has been at work on its program's memory-management facilities. The program applies extended memory if you need it, up to 16MB of RAM, and can also temporarily appropriate as much as 32MB of space on your hard-disk drive for virtual memory, which helps a basic IMB machine operate as if it had much more memory.

Although Release 3.1 is not a Windows application, it can nevertheless be used under Microsoft Windows 3.0 and integrates well with other applications you may have running in Windows.

I found that Release 3.1 requires an extremely lengthy installation process, but the procedure is well designed and easy to follow. The documentation is pretty well done, although I found its organizational scheme difficult to follow. Don't look to the index for help: Many of the page references are simply wrong; I suspect that Lotus managed to publish an old index for a new manual.

As good as Release 3.1 is, there remains some room for further integration of Impress. As it stands, you'll still have to deal with varying menu structures for the two programs, including a few inconsistencies.