casterli (01/18/83)
I was just sent a preliminary (review) copy of Lotus 1-2-3, and am I impressed! These guys are out to put VisiCorp out of business in a big way. Lotus 1-2-3 is well worth looking at if you are in the market for an *extremely powerful* spread sheet program (and then some). The package supports 255 columns by 2048 rows, and requires 128K (about 30K free), and two disk drives. It comes on one 320K diskette, with another disk for the tutorial program. Both disks are nearly full. Besides the massive size of the spread sheet, the program offers *many* powerful financial, stat, math, and logical functions, lookup tables, conditional statements, sorts (primary and secondary keys), database functions, (apparently limited) text functions, and much more. The program is *extremely* friendly, with about 170K of on-line help text (stored on the disk, with very fast access); I believe that every command and function has at least one full page of explanitory text, with direct access to logically related features. The package is able to directly process VisiCalc and WordStar files (as well as almost any other file). 1-2-3 offers *many* print options such as headers, footers, left, right, top, and bottom margins, formatted print, setup strings (in decimal), and formula printouts. Applications can be made very friendly also, as the package has protected fields and user-defined keyboard macros. I probably don't know half of what the package will do, as there were *no* manuals sent with the software (a call to the company revealed that the manuals were still at the printer). Lotus 1-2-3 should be available for the IBM PC about the first of February, and will most likely be available for other 16 bit (and larger) systems in the future. This one is well worth waiting for! Leroy Casteline Fort Collins, Co.
casterli (01/18/83)
I should add that I am in no way connected with Lotus... Leroy