Thank you for using the Mesa spreadsheet for OS/2.
Mesa for OS/2 v2.0.4 is our third update of Mesa for OS/2 and is available free to all registered Mesa for OS/2 users. It includes several new features as well as a number of bug fixes and general improvements.
Here is a quick summary of the improvements in this version:
Usability Enhancements
Keyboard typeahead has been restored
Improved keyboard handling, including Shift-Arrow keys to select ranges,
and End-arrow keys to move quickly around a workbook layer
Ability to Find & Replace or Replace All entries in a workbook
Page Tabs displayed at the bottom of a workbook, and can be hidden
Ability to SmartSize(TM) Rows and Columns
Substantial redraw performance improvements
Recalculation and graph-redraw are performed as background processes
Feature Enhancements
Print Preview
Formula Builder
In-cell Editing
Script Recorder and Additional MScript commands
Text Box Graphics
File Format Enhancements
Lotus 1-2-3 WK4 Import and Export capability
Quattro for Windows WB1 Import capability
Improved ASCII Import capability
For a complete description of product changes, please look at the on-line documentation under the heading "What's new in Mesa 2.0.4". The on-line documentation is available through the Mesa Online Documentation INF file, which should have automatically been installed in your Mesa 2 folder, as well as through the Mesa help system.
The background redrawing of graphs is new to Mesa 2.0.4. Changes that require a graph to be redrawn
will put up a grey box where the graph will eventually appear. Mesa will draw the graph to an off-screen buffer,
in the background, and when the graph is ready it will be updated on-screen automatically. You can use the
application, change graph settings, or data, etc. without waiting for the graph to be redrawn.
The INF and help files have been revised to reflect the new functionality within Mesa -- for example, the new keyboard commands have been documented in several places in the on-line help. Please be aware that the documentation for these features supercedes what is written in the Mesa User's Guide. We are working on a revised User's Guide, but the overhead costs and turnaround time associated with printing bound documents are prohibitive for interim updates.
There are new example files available with Mesa 2.0.4. These are completely different from the ones that shipped with 2.0.2. Those files are still available; in particular, a REXX scripting example can be found in EXAMPLES\ACCOUNT.M2.
Listed below are some known problems with the most current revision of Mesa. As always, producing and maintaining software is a process of continuing growth and learning through experience. Our goal is to continually improve our product in response to customer feedback; your comments (both positive and negative) are much-needed cooperation in that goal. In addition, we expect to be making our bug-list available to the public via our ftp site. Send us mail at info@athena.com, or look at ftp.athena.com in the near future
0. Installing over previous revisions gives a SYS2070 error at run-time.
Using the installer to delete a previous version of Mesa, or to install over
a previous version, does not always find all of the earlier versions of Mesa's DLL's.
The SYS2070 error is the run-time error message that OS/2 will display in this case.
If this happens to you, the easiest solution is to type the following command at the
root directory of each drive that could be accessed via OS/2's LIBPATH:
DIR MESACORE.DLL /s
This will locate any previously existing copies of the Mesa DLL's. Switch to
the directory indicated by the results of that command, and either delete or rename the
Mesa DLL's that are there. Then re-install Mesa for OS/2. If that does not resolve the
problem, please contact Athena Design's technical support at m2-support@athena.com, or
via fax at 1.617.426.7665.
1. Selecting a range at 50% or 25% Zoom.
We've made a number of improvements to the display logic, and one of the side effects is that selecting an area of a worksheet that requires scrolling at these zoom settings will leave screen lines on the display under some situations. These are display remnants, and minimizing/restoring the screen will clear them up immediately. We recognize that they are unsightly, however, and will be working to remove them in a future version of Mesa.
Additionally, selecting multiple overlapping discontiguous ranges will cause the overlapped region to display inverted or not, depending on the number of overlaps. That is, if you select a1:b20, and a5:e5, the overlap block (a5:b5) will be inverted twice, and therefore will appear uninverted. If you then add the range a4:af6, the overlap range (a5:b5) will be inverted thrice, and will appear inverted again. This is purely a visual effect; the ranges are inclusive regardless of their appearance.
2. File association types and extensions.
There are a number of concerns relating to the relationship between file-name extensions and file-type associations during file saving and exporting. We are aware of them and are looking into a coherent solution to them.
Currently, if you do not include an extension in your file name, Mesa for OS/2 automatically appends one based on the file type you have chosen.
If you do include an extension, Mesa for OS/2 sets the file type based on that extension. If the extension is ambiguous (as with XLS, which can mean either Excel 3 or Excel 4 format), Mesa chooses between the permissable options based on the file type menu settings. If the file-type menu setting is not an allowable option (for example, if the file name is output.xls and the file-type menu reads Mesa 2 spreadsheet file), an intelligent default is chosen (in this case, Excel 4 worksheet format).
When loading files, the Type of file: listbox refers to extended attributes as well. If you have (for example) Lotus 123 files created from a DOS or Windows version of Lotus, those files probably do not have the 123 DOS Spreadsheet extended attribute set, so you must set the Type of file to All Files, and then type the filename mask that you desire in the Open Filename: box.
3. File exporting and importing.
Within Mesa for OS/2, Excel 4 means Excel 4 worksheets, not workbooks. Currently, we do not support Excel 4 or 5 workbook import or export. It is on our list to add in a future release.
Also, we are aware that not all formating information comes through on import and export. We will be continually improving this behavior; however, we decided to make the bulk of the data-transfer functionality available now rather than wait until our next release to provide the whole thing. Please let us know what particular features are missing that are important to you.
4. Selection manager issues.
The selection manager communicates with the application on a regular basis to update itself. This can sometimes interfere with controls -- for example, entering values in spin buttons or choosing entries from list boxes -- when the manager updates itself during an edit. The bulk of these problems have been corrected in this release -- working with the selection manager should be a much more pleasant experience. However, there may still be times when values are reset if chosen incorrectly. We are aware of these, and will be working to correct them in a future release.
5. Graphs and graphics issues.
* Graphs do not take text as headers for 3x3 ranges
It works correctly for other range sizes as far as we know.
* Graphing discontinuous ranges
If you select a discontinuous range and graph it, Mesa builds a virtual range by appending the second and subsequent ranges underneath the first. We recognize that this is not the right behavior for selecting multiple columns, and will be revising this behavior in a future release.
* Pie charts default to Group Rows, even if you really want Group Columns
If you select a single column of data and create a pie chart from it, the graph will appear as a single color. Right-click on the graph, choose Graph Settings, and change the Orientation radio button from Group Rows to Group Columns, and you will see the pie chart draw itself correctly.
6. Printing issues.
There have been a number of printer problems identified by our users. We have worked with IBM to identify problems in several drivers, and some of these problems have been fixed in the Warp FullPak drivers. We have installed workarounds in our code for several others.
However, there are still many issues left unresolved that we will be working on for future releases, either to fix ourselves or to work with IBM to fix. Among the issues that have been reported:
* Row and Column headings are sometimes inverted
* Colored text sometimes prints as black
* Non-outline fonts are extremely slow
* Landscape printing doesn't work on HP IIIP PostScript printer (Apple
LaserWriter Plus emulator)
* Blank pages are often added to the ends of files on HP DeskJets
and LaserJets
If you run into these or other printing issues, please let us know exactly what happens, and provide the following information:
Version of OS/2
Printer
Printer driver (name, version, date, size)
7. Swapping on a Pentium machine
We have been able to crash Mesa while performing operations on large (i.e. over 150,000 cells) ranges. These crashes only seem to occur on Pentium systems, and only seem to occur in instances of heavy swapping. At this point, we believe the problem to be related to the OS/2 memory allocation routines during swapping. We are making IBM aware of this issue. If anyone is able to reproduce these crashes on other machine architectures or without introducing substantial swapping, please contact us so that we can track down the problem.
If your work requires you to work with large files, our recommendation at this time is to increase your system RAM, or work in smaller stages. Turning off Undo will also help reduce the RAM requirements of Mesa.
8. Problems with various bitmap files
There are a number of different .BMP file formats available, and Mesa only handles one
of them gracefully. We have seen bitmaps get imported with incorrect colors, and have seen
problems with saving out bitmaps (to a file or to an undo stream) of certain types. We are
aware of these issues and will be working to improve them in future versions. For now, we
recommend that you save your file before importing any bitmap image files into a Mesa
workbook.
What happened to Mesa 2.0.3?
We released Mesa 2.0.3, and then learned of several bugs that were important enough to stop shipment of the application. While we were fixing those bugs, we also made a number of performance improvements. We hope you enjoy the new version of Mesa, and we apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.
