Favourite Quote:
“the performance just totally shocked me… worse than VBA, which I didn’t think was possible”
(in reference to C# automatin functions)

Harlan, just water in a very muddy, very gritty very crunchy bottle. Coffee would be a good idea though – might speed me up a little.

Hazel – our dog won’t go out unless she is absolutely desperate.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/city-swelters-records-tumble-in-heat-20090207-80ai.html

I would have thought people would have thought of that LONG ago but don’t know if they do and if many peopl even think that way – makes perfect sense to me though …

Dick

I used Lotus Symphony back in 1984 (since it was cheaper than buying both 123 and WordStar), then branched out to VP Planner (one of the spreadsheet competitors Lotus killed off by lawsuit) then to 123. I’ve used or evaluated a lot of different spreadsheets, but I never tried SuperCalc or Javelin Plus (which wasn’t really a spreadsheet, but from everything I recall reading it would have been a much better business application development platform than spreadsheets, it’s just that it required some design-before-implement discipline which ruined its chances compared to the instant gratification of spreadsheets). I also tried Lotus Improv and a similar product named Advance, but calculation hypercubes and formula by dimension just aren’t general enough/are too restrictive.

FWIW, the spreadsheet wars ended in 1997 with MSO 97 and Lotus SmartSuite 97. VBE is SO MUCH BETTER than the LotusScript IDE that that alone would have been enough to kill off Lotus. The 123 object model was a virus writer’s playground. There was no way to turn off macros, only a way to disable processing of macros automatically run at startup (the equivalents of Excel’s Auto_Open macros and Workbook_Open event handlers). No way to disable, say, the 123 OM equivalent of SheetCalculate event handlers. Unlike Excel, 123’s calculation mode was[/is?] determined by the calculation mode at time of last file-save of the most recently opened file. Therefore, all it would take in 123 would be saving a workbook with the formula @RAND or @NOW in one cell under automatic recalculation and anything at all in the OnCalculate event handler, and there’d be no way to prevent 123 from recalculating on opening that file, so no way to bypass that OnCalculate event handler. In short, it was a very good thing Lotus died off when it did since it’s last chance to win back some respect/market share was as crappy as it was.