gnu@toad.com (11/27/90)
My company bought WingZ for handling our financial planning. We have been quite disappointed. Not only does it not run under Open Windows 1.0 on a SPARCstation-1 GX, SunOS 4.0.3c (it core dumps periodically), but even when we take down the window system and run SunView (:-*), it's a lousy spreadsheet. Perhaps all spreadsheets are like this, but I couldn't believe that there is no way in it to say 'this column of numbers should come from the spreadsheet called "March", column 1, rows 1-50 every time I open it' for example. Building annual sheets involves copying all the numbers by hand -- and they don't update when the originals update. There is some feature that purports to do this, but you have to laboriously open up all twelve monthly spreadsheets on the screen and THEN open up the annual one. Haven't these guys heard of the file system? The user interface is klunky in a number of other ways. Perhaps this is a state of the art spreadsheet, but in that case I think we need some evolution in spreadsheet technology. Perhaps it is just a hangover from the DOS/Mac world where it is assumed that if anything gets done it is because the user pushed a key or a mouse button. But automation of commonly done tasks is one reason we're all on Unix, and WingZ just doesn't have that attitude. John Gilmore
bauman@shell.com (Evan G. Bauman) (12/08/90)
>The user interface is klunky in a number of other ways. Perhaps this is a >state of the art spreadsheet, but in that case I think we need some >evolution in spreadsheet technology. Perhaps it is just a hangover from >the DOS/Mac world where it is assumed that if anything gets done it is >because the user pushed a key or a mouse button. But automation of >commonly done tasks is one reason we're all on Unix, and WingZ just >doesn't have that attitude. The consensus around here is that Wingz is one of the most poorly programmed pieces of commercial software we've ever seen for Suns. It updates the screen too many times for simple mouse movements. And on some computers, these screen updates take up to 20 seconds! (Try running Wingz on a color 386i-20). I have a Sparc 1+GX and even I get tired of waiting for Wingz screen updates. It also crashes periodically under sunview. There aren't enough keyboard shortcuts for mouse commands. I find that using Wingz for an afternoon can make my mouse hand cramp up. I never had this happen with other software. I hope the next version is a better product. Evan G. Bauman - Combustion/Reaction Engineering Shell Development Company - Westhollow Research Center PO Box 1380; Houston, TX 77251-1380 bauman@shell.com "The owls are not what they seem"