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1989-08-04
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Opus v. 2.00 --- Changes
The original version of Opus appeared in the Sept. 1988 ST-Log,
and it was a functional, if not ideal, spreadsheet. It admittedly
had a few deficiencies: it was only average in speed, and it would
crash upon certain conditions peculiar to Personal Pascal.
However, I've yet to hear of any bugs in the program. Well, to
make a long story short, I've rewritten Opus, largely from the
ground up, in Mark Williams C. Redesigning important data
structures and development of more efficient algorithms coupled
with use of C has resulted in a robust, extremely fast program
that's as easy to use as the original. The speed of recalculation
and most other operations is fully competitive with LDW Power, the
fastest spreadsheet I know of for the ST. And the potential to
crash went away with Personal Pascal.
While practically every feature of the original is present, a
couple of things were sacrificed. The "functions menu" is gone, as
it took a fair amount of code and was relatively superfluous.
Also, the "data fill" option to fill a range with weekday or month
names is gone (I anticipate a more powerful feature in a future
release). Note that files are not compatible with the original
version; I will maintain compatibility with this version in future
revisions.
Some of the changes/enhancements follow:
- named cell and range references are supported
- financial functions now require all arguments
- regression functions now support linear, power,
exponential, and logarithmic models (that is, they
perform a transformation on the data for you, saving you
a step)
- now you can hide and protect cells
- the number formatting options have been greatly expanded
- hyperbolic trig functions
- RATE financial function
- ROW,ROWS,COLUMN,COLUMNS functions
- ISERR function
- PERM and COMB functions for calculating permutations and
combinations
- file operations are now very fast, due largely to efficient
use of a ten-sector buffering scheme
- sorting is much faster, partly because of the more
efficient data structures, but largely due to use of the
ShellSort algorithm. (When first developing the sorting
module, I used a bubble sort as it's the only sorting
algorithm I can do off the top of my head, and I was
more concerned with getting the "compare function"
correct. I rather stupidly forgot to change to a more
efficient algorithm before publishing Opus! My humblest
apologies to anyone who's waited a long time to sort a
range...)
- default paths and worksheet and chart defaults can be saved
to a configuration file read at boot-time
- "Save As" and option to "save a file with backup"
- "Freeze Titles" works a little differently; now if you say
freeze row 10 with rows 5-20 on screen, rows 5-10 remain
on-screen as "frozen titles"
- block selection via the mouse has been enhanced; now the
cells are highlighted on the fly, you can move in any
direction, and the worksheet scrolls if you move beyond
its borders
- column widths now range from 1-99
- control of printer margins
- the charting facility is completely new
- Doug Harrison
3/8/89