djs@hou2b.UUCP (D.SPATHIS) (12/13/84)
[Froboz Magic Line Saver]
Last night Lotus demonstrated their Jazz program for the Mac to the business SIG
of NYMUG. I will describe what I can recall. The program is scheduled for
release at the end of March and will list for $595. Jazz requires a 512K MAC
and Lotus STRONGLY RECOMMENDS (read requires) a second disk drive. As shipped,
Jazz occupies about 300K on disk (note that this is merely an estimate as the
code is not yet finished). The Jazz disk is installed in one drive and the MAC
system disk in the other drive. Also, forget about the ramdisks.
The program consists of 5 areas of functionality: word processing, spreadsheet,
graphics (chart) capability, data base system, and communications. It is
overlaid in memory but allocates at least 256K for user data which is not
overlaid (ie no virtual user data space). The different functions are very well
integrated with each other and, via the clipboard, with other MAC applications.
They have added a control region just below the menu bar. It is roughly twice
the hieght of the menu bar and extends across the screen. Its contents vary
based on which application you are currently using but always seem to contain
icons that perform various tasks. Just click on the appropriate icon. This is
far superior to pulldown menus and command keys (which they also use) for common
functions. Examples: scroll to next/previous record, scroll to first/last
record. There is a zoom-in zoom-out feature that resizes the current window to
full screen size (minus room for the menu/control areas) and back. This is a
real timesaver - no more dragging windows and corners! The edit menu remembers
the open windows by name - just one click and presto it's front and center.
The word processor looks very much like MacWrite but can have multiple files
open simultaneously (of course only one window active at a time). It will not
read MacWrite documents except in text mode. The MacWrite format is proprietary
(sp?). Otherwise, it "basically can do anything MacWrite can do." I didn't see
any page numbers in the elevator box though.
The spreadsheet looked like a spreadsheet. It had something like 255 columns
('A' - 'IV') and 8192 rows. God pity the poor soul that ever ENTERS that much
information. You can select blocks of cells via the MacWrite click, shift-click
method by pointing to the diagonal corners. The more conventional single cell
click and the dotted box work also.
The chart capability allows for data to be taken from the spreadsheet and
grahped, in various forms, with auto-scaling to fit the window. If the window
changes size, the graph is redrwan - not stretched - to fit the new window. For
the demonstration, several cells in the spreadsheet were selected and a bar
chart drawn. Then the data in the spreadsheet was changed and THE BAR CHART
READJUSTED AUTOMATICALLY!! This occurred even when the chart was pasted into a
word processing document!! There are options for freezing the current chart or
table in a document so the numbers may be changed without affecting the
document.
The data base is a flat, record oriented data base. It is not relational nor
anything else fancy. It has an associated form setup fascility that lays the
fields out on the page. It has three levels of sorting (3 keys) and could at
least sort a screenful of records instantly. The name and address fields (if
they existed) could be selected and pasted into a document and printed. Big
deal you say. Well, guess what happens to that document when you select the
next record in the data base. Instant mail merge.
The communications program has many of the same features as MacTerminal. It
does a better job at hiding unneccessary options from the user. The menus are
much less cluttered here than with MacTerminal. It also has the ability to
accept many more foreign (strange) input formats via some simple parsing
constructs like extract data in columns 15-37 only. That last phrase was only a
description, not an illustration.
This seems to be the best integrated software package ever. Not only do the
different functions cooperate superbely with each other, but even the MAC itself
seem to have bocome part of the package. The keyboard is used strictly for
data entry; the screen SHOWS you your creation and all the time it's mighty
mouse that does the real work.
Again, let me say that this is presented from my best recollections and any
misstatements are not intentional.
-- Dennis Spathis
hou2b!djs