Sum*It Manual

A tour around the User Interface

The window

When you launch Sum*It by double clicking its icon, it will start with a new empty sheet. This sheet has several parts which will be discussed here.
Fig. 1, After starting Sum*It

The biggest part, covering almost the entire window is the cell grid. In here the data will be displayed. You can select cells in this area by clicking and dragging. Inside the current selection there is always one active cell. This cell has some ants walking along its borders.

Click...	...drag...	...and drop!

Fig. 2-4, Click in cell A1, drag to B2 and drop.

If you click into selected cell(s) you can drag these to another position in the same or another window, or even to the desktop or another program. If you keep the OPTION key down while dragging, the selection is copied rather than moved.

Every cell in this cell grid has a name. The cell in the top left corner is called 'A1', the next cell to the right is B1 and the cell beneath A1 is A2.

Along the left and top of the cell grid you find the borders, containing the names of the columns and rows in the cell grid. By clicking in the top border you can select entire columns, likewise clicking in the vertical border selects entire rows. Clicking in the top left rectangle of the borders selects all the cells.

First select the columns...	...then drag the indicator...	...and release the mouse.

Figure 5, resizing multiple columns to the same size

If you click between two columns in the top border you can resize the column width. If your selection in the cell grid spans more than one column and contains the column you resize, all the columns inside the selection get the same columns width. This also aplies to the rows.

In the bottom left corner of the window you find a pane in which the current selection is displayed. If you click this pane a dialog will be opened where you can enter a new range which will then be selected.

Along the top of the window there are two buttons and an edit box. The edit box is used to enter a formula or value into the active cell. If the active cell has some data its formula or value is displayed here. You can edit the existing cell content by clicking inside this edit box (or by typing OPTION-LEFT or OPTION-RIGHT) and then edit the content as you would in any edit box.
If you are finished you can accept this formula by clicking the accept button (the one with the green v) or type the ENTER, RETURN or TAB key. If you don't want to enter the newly edited formula you can click the reject button (the one with the red x) or type ESC.

If you type RETURN, then the cell beneath the current active cell will become the active cell, if you typed SHIFT-ENTER the cell above the current cell will become the active cell. Likewise, if you type TAB the active cell moves right, SHIFT-TAB moves it right. ENTER does not move the active cell if the selection contains only one cell.
If there is no next cell, the active cell will wrap. e.g. if you hit RETURN but the active cell is on the bottom of the selection, the next active cell will be on the top of the column right to this cell.

What remains in our window are the standard scrollbars and resize button. These work as you would expect in a normal Mac program.

The menus

The File menu contains the standard File menu items. First of all there is New which opens a blank new sheet. Open opens a dialog with which you can open documents. The documents you see in this dialog are Sum*It's own files, text files and SYLK files, (if they have the proper creator and signature). When you open a text file, Sum*It tries to detect whether it is a SYLK file (a file format used by e.g. Excel to export to other programs) or a plain text file. You can than choose through a dialog which format to use. Sum*It has some basic SYLK support and can convert tab or comma delimited files.

The Save menu items saves the current document, and the Save As item opens a dialog with which you can assign a new name to your document. This dialog also has the option to choose a different file format to export to. You can save the document as tab or comma delimited text file, or you can save it as a SYLK file which can then be opened by e.g. Excel.

Page Setup opens yet another dialog in which you can change settings that affect printed output. The options are whether to print gridlines and borders or not. You can also change the margins here. After changing these options the page breaks in the document are recalculated. The page breaks can be identified as gridlines having a different pattern.

Print lets you print the document and Quit quits the application.

The Edit menu contains some standard items as Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste Clear and Select All. These work as expected. When you copy some cells, they are placed on the clipboard and can be pasted at a later time. When you switch to another application these cells are converted to tab delimited text which can be pasted into the other program. The options Show Clipboard reveals a windows which always shows the current content of the clipboard.

Some Sum*It proper menu items can be found in the Edit menu. The first are Fill Right and Fill Down. These commands are enabled only if you have more than one cell selected. They enable you to fill a selection with the same values or formulas as can be found in the first cell(s) of the row(s) or column(s) respectively.

The next two commands let you insert or delete rows or colums. They are enabled only when you selected rows or columns. When you insert, a check is made to be sure no cells will fall of the edges.

The Layout menu enables you to change the format of the selected cells. The settings of the active cell are marked. The first four items are submenus which control the standard settings Font, size, style and color.

Then there are items which control the alignment of the cell content. Left, center and right speek for themselves, but general deserves some explanation, when this is cheched then numbers and date/time values will be right aligned, boolean and string values will be left aligned.
Next are items which control the format in which numbers are formatted. General in this case means the number will be displayed with the minimal number of digits that are necessary to approximate the value of the number which fits the width of the cell. If the number cannot be displayed correctly in this width, an attempt is made to format the number in Scientific format. If this doesn't succeed either, an exclamation character (!) is displayed.

Currency formats the number as a currency, Percentage as a Percentage. Fixed freezes the number of digits, and you can change this number with the Digits menu item. Scientific format the value as a scientific number. Formula does not display the result of formulas, but rather the formula itself.

Date/Time enables you to display a date/time value as a date or as a time.
Commas controls the use of thousand separator characters.

BTW, all the formatting of numbers (and of dates/times) are controlled by system settings. This means that if you want to change e.g. the formatting of currencies, you will have to change this in the Numbers control panel. This also applies to the parsing of entered formulas.

The Options menu contains the Recalculate item which recalculates the spreadsheet. Sort opens a dialog which lets you sort a selection of cells. You can define up to three key rows of colums and whether to sort by column or by row and ascending or descending. The Fill item lets you fill a selection with incrementing or decrementing values. You should give a start value and either a step value or an end value. The other value will be calculated and the selection will be filled.

Go To opens the same dialog as you get when you click the selection pane in the bottom left corner of the window. It enables you to select a range of cells.

The last menu is the Windows menu. This shows all the opened windows. Dirty documents (changed since last saved) are displayed in bold.