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F r e e C a l c Version 2.0 A User Supported Spreadsheet PLUS The FreeCalc Auditor (C) Copyright 1988 Stilwell Software Products All Rights Reserved Stilwell Software Products 1336 East Krista Way Tempe, AZ 85284 (602) 820-4952 **** CONTENTS **** USER SUPPORTED SOFTWARE ...................... 1 INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC SPREADSHEETS ......................... 4 FREECALC SPECIFICATIONS ...................... 6 FILES ON THE FREECALC DISKETTE ............... 6 INTRODUCTION TO FREECALC ..................... 8 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSION 2.0 AND THE EARLIER RELEASES OF FREECALC .................................... 10 GETTING STARTED ............................. 12 DEMO 1 ...................................... 17 DEMO 2 ...................................... 27 DEMO 3 ...................................... 39 REFERENCE SECTION ATTRIBUTES ............................. 54 BLANK .................................. 56 COLOR .................................. 57 COPY .................................. 60 CURSOR MOVEMENT ....................... 62 DELETE ................................. 64 DIRECTORY .............................. 65 ENTER .................................. 68 FORMULA ................................ 71 GOTO ................................... 75 HELP ................................... 76 INSERT ................................. 77 LOAD ................................... 79 MOVE ................................... 81 NEW .................................... 83 PRINT .................................. 84 QUIT ................................... 87 RECALC ................................. 88 SAVE ................................... 93 TEACH (MACROS) ......................... 95 THE FREECALC AUDITOR ................... 97 WP (WORD PROCESSING) ................... 99 XPORT ................................. 101 DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY ..................... 103 INDEX ...................................... 104 USER SUPPORTED SOFTWARE FreeCalc is a "user supported" program. What is meant by that is, FreeCalc is available to anyone who wants to use it at a no cost (if you get FreeCalc from Stilwell Software Products we charge $10 to help cover the cost of postage and handling). This method of distributing computer software allows you to try FreeCalc without having to pay for it in advance. It also allows you to freely share FreeCalc with other users without the fear of prosecution by the owner of the program. If you find FreeCalc of use you are asked to send a contribution of $47.50 to its author: Stilwell Software Products 1336 East Krista Way Tempe, AZ 85284 By sending a contribution you will become a registered owner of FreeCalc. You will receive a printed copy of the manual and will be eligible for support from us. You will also receive a program called The FreeCalc Auditor at no extra cost. The FreeCalc Auditor will examine your FreeCalc spreadsheets looking for possible errors. It will (1) also produce a listing of all your formulas, and a listing of all the places where your spreadsheet's cells are referenced. By contributing, you will enable us to send you information on new versions of FreeCalc as they become available as well as other new programs from Stilwell Software Products. You will also be supporting a means of software develop- ment that will give you quality software at a greatly reduced price. You may receive a copy of FreeCalc by one of two methods. First, you can send a $47.50 contribution to Stilwell Software Products and we will mail you a diskette which will contain the FreeCalc program, the FreeCalc Auditor program, and the printed manual. The second way is for you to send $10 to Stilwell Software Products. We will send you a diskette with the FreeCalc program, and the documentation on the diskette. You will not receive the printed manual, The FreeCalc Auditor, nor will you be eligible for our support. You may then use the software and make a contribution later if you wish. Once you mail the addi- tional contribution to Stilwell Software Products, we will send you the printed manual, the current version of FreeCalc, the FreeCalc Auditor, and we will make you eligible for support. You are always free to make copies of FreeCalc and to share them with (2) others. You are not permitted to sell FreeCalc nor can you include it with any product you are distributing. You may not modify FreeCalc in any way. You may NOT share The FreeCalc Auditor. This program is NOT a user supported pro- gram. It is solely for the use of registered owners of FreeCalc. Regardless of how you get the program, if you find FreeCalc useful, your contribution will be greatly appreciated. (3) INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC SPREADSHEETS FreeCalc is an a member of the type of computer program called "electronic spreadsheets". You can think of a spreadsheet (or "sheet") as a big calculator. A spreadsheet cannot do anything you could not do with a pencil, paper and calculator, it just allows you to do your work many times faster. It also allows you to get a printed copy of your work. When speaking of spreadsheets it is difficult not to use the phrase "What if....?". The electronic spreadsheet allows the user to look at the data in several different ways. If you have a business you might ask the question "What if we hired 10 more workers (for an example of this type of question see DEMO3, a spreadsheet example included with FreeCalc)?" After knowing the answer to that question you might ask "What would be the effect on the company if instead of hiring 10 new workers we were to hire 20?" With a spreadsheet you can make one change and get the answer to the above question instantly. With a paper and pencil method it may take you several minutes. Spreadsheets are often used for forecasting and for budgeting. FreeCalc includes two spreadsheets for home budgets (DEMO1 AND (4) DEMO2) and one for a business budget (DEMO3). Spreadsheets are not restricted to just dealing with dollars. Anywhere you can define a relationship that involves numbers you can use a spreadsheet. FreeCalc also includes a limited word processor. If you write memos, letters and short reports, the word processing features found in FreeCalc may be all that you need. You can adjust the left margin, copy, move, or delete text. You can also center, left alien, or right alien text. FreeCalc does not support "word wrap" (word wrap moves the cursor to the next line when the current line is full). If you find you need more word processing features, you might want to take a look at our word processing program call FreeWord. (5) FREECALC SPECIFICATIONS FreeCalc requires an IBM-PC, PC-XT, PC-Portable, or PC-AT and the following; (1) 256KB RAM, and DOS 2.0 or later. (2) Either monochrome or color monitor. (3) At least one double-sided disk drive (you can use more diskette drives or a hard disk). (4) Any PC parallel printer. FILES ON THE FREECALC DISKETTE: FC.EXE - The actual FreeCalc program FC.HLP - The online help file, can be deleted from your work disk if you need the space on your diskette. COLOR.EXE - A utility program for users of color monitors to set the color of the screen. NO-COLOR.FIL - Copy this file to "COLOR.FIL" if you have a color graphics card, but a monochrome display. This will improve the appearance of the characters on the screen. ONE2TWO.EXE - This program will convert spreadsheets created with versions 1.0 and 1.01 of FreeCalc to a format the FreeCalc Version 2.0 can use. This file can be deleted from your work (6) disk after converting any version 1.0 or 1.01 spreadsheets, or if you do not have any version 1.0 or 1.01 spreadsheets. OPTIONAL FILES: READ.ME - Instructions on how to print the documentation file if it is on your diskette (you only have this file if you did not get the printed manual). FC.DOC - Documentation file, (if you did not get the printed manual) this can also be deleted from your work disk to give you more room on your diskette. AUDIT.EXE - The FreeCalc Auditor program. This program is only included on your diskette if you contributed the $47.50. (7) INTRODUCTION TO FREECALC FreeCalc is an electronic spread- sheet that has 250 rows and 50 columns. This means that it has 12,500 "cells" or places to store information. FreeCalc had been designed to give particular attention to the needs of the first time spreadsheet user. For example, you can create a useful spreadsheet without any knowledge of how to write a formula in FreeCalc. This is made possible by FreeCalc providing you with certain basic formulas and allowing you to "point" to the numbers that you want to be included in the formula. For example, if you wanted to add a column of numbers this is what you would do. Select the "Formula" option at the Action Menu. Next, you would use the arrow keys to move the cursor to the location in your spreadsheet where you wanted FreeCalc to put the result of the formula. After completing that, you would select the "System Supplied" option at the Formula Menu. Since we want to "Sum" the numbers, we would select that option from the System Supplied menu. Next, you would move the cursor to the first number that you want to add. You press the ENTER key two times to tell FreeCalc that you are selecting that row and that column. FreeCalc will then ask you to locate the last number you want to include in the formula. You "point" to that number by moving the cursor to the last number in (8) the column and pressing the ENTER key twice to make that selection. The last thing you need to do is to press the ESC (Escape) key to tell FreeCalc that you have selected the starting points of the formula. That is it! But don't think that FreeCalc is only for beginners. The program also has an area for you to enter your own formulas. These formulas can be as complex as you like. They can contain any number of expressions, and paren- theses may be nested as deeply as you wish. FreeCalc is distributed with three demo spreadsheets and a tutorial. An attempt has been made to provide you with a system that is both easy to learn and use, as well as powerful enough so that after you have learned the system it will remain extremely valuable. (9) DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSION 2.0 AND THE EARLIER RELEASES OF FREECALC Version 2.0 of FreeCalc has been entirely rewritten in the C programming langauge. The earlier two versions were written in complied BASIC. We have included the program ONE2TWO (One 2 Two) to convert your old version one spread- sheets to the new version two format. ONE2TWO will prompt you for the name of the spreadsheet you want to convert. That is really all you have to do. The conversion program will do everything else for you. Here is a list of some of the differences between version 2.0 and the earlier versions: 1. Much faster screen updates. 2. Faster loading, and saving of your spreadsheets. 3. Spreadsheets can be 5 times larger. 4. Will use all available memory (up to 640KB). 5. Supports "macros" for storing repetitive keystrokes. 6. Variable column widths (and hidden columns). 7. Insert rows and columns. (10) 8. Copy rows and columns. 9. Move rows and columns. 10. Delete rows and columns. 11. Word processing mode. 12. Ability to deal with larger numbers (15 significant digits instead of 7). 13. Use of the Intel 8087 and the 80287 math coprocessor chip if installed on your computer. 14. Extended online help. We hope that these improvements will help you in your work with Free- Calc. (11) GETTING STARTED FIRST!! The first thing to do with any software is to make a copy of the original. You will probably want to store the original and use only the copy (the "work diskette"). This will insure that you have a good copy of FreeCalc should anything ever happen to your work diskette. To make a copy. Put a blank diskette in drive B and a diskette that has the FORMAT program (supplied on the DOS diskette from IBM) in the A drive. Type "FORMAT B:" (don't type the quotes). This will format the diskette. Step 2. Remove from drive A the FORMAT diskette and insert the FreeCalc diskette. Type "COPY *.* B:" (don't type the quotes). This will copy all the files from the FreeCalc diskette to your work diskette. Remove the documentation file by typing "Del b:fc.doc", after you have printed the documentation. We suggest you put a write protect tab on the original FreeCalc diskette if you have not already done so, and store that disk- ette. (To do this put a piece of tape, which came with your diskettes, over the notch in the upper-right corner of the diskette). For additional information on formatting a diskette and copying files from a diskette see your DOS manual. If you have a file called (12) FC.DOC on your work diskette (type "DIR FC.DOC" to find out), you might want to delete it after printing it to make more room on your diskette (you will not have this file on your diskette if you contributed $47.50 since you were sent a printed version of the documentation). You can delete the documentation file by typing "DEL FC.DOC" (don't type the quotes). Do not put a write protect tab on your work diskette since FreeCalc needs to write to that disk from time to time. If you have a color monitor on your system you might want to first run a program called COLOR. FreeCalc is able to determine if your system has a color graphics card in it or not. If you do have a color graphics card, FreeCalc will display the screens in color. If you do not like the colors that FreeCalc uses you can run the COLOR program to select different colors. To start COLOR put the diskette that has the file COLOR.EXE in your default disk drive (this should be on your work diskette), and type the word COLOR. Press any key to get pass the start-up screen. Then just follow the directions given to you by the COLOR program. The COLOR program will create a file called COLOR.FIL. This file must be on the same diskette (and in the same directory) as the FreeCalc program. When FreeCalc starts it will search the current directory for that file if you have a color graphics card. If the file COLOR.FIL is not on your disk, FreeCalc will use the default color values. (13) If you have a color graphics card, but a monochrome display you will need to copy the file called "NO-COLOR.FIL" to "COLOR.FIL". This will improve the appearance of the characters on the screen. The portable COMPAQ and the IBM PC Portable both use this type of configuration. You can delete the COLOR.EXE file from your work diskette (you will want to leave it on the original diskette) once you are happy with your selection of the colors for FreeCalc, or if you do not have a color monitor, by typing "DEL COLOR.EXE" (don't type the quotes). Now you are ready to start Free- Calc. To do that just type the letters "FC", and press the ENTER key. Once FreeCalc loads you will see the start-up screen. When you are ready to continue simply press any key. The next screen will be a blank spreadsheet. The white box in row 1 column 1 is called the "cursor". The cursor represents your location on the spread- sheet. You might want to first practice moving the cursor around. There are several ways of moving the cursor. The arrow keys on the number pad moves the cursor in the direction of the arrow. The `Home' key moves the cursor to the TOP-LEFT position of the screen. (14) The `End' key move the cursor to the LOWER-RIGHT position of the screen. The `Pg Up' key moves the cursor to the screen area ABOVE your present position. That is, you will be moved to the 20 rows ABOVE your present location. The `Pg Dn' key moves the cursor to the screen area BELOW your present position. Holding the `Ctrl' key down while pressing the `Home' key will move you to the START of the spreadsheet. Holding the `Ctrl' key down while pressing the `End' key will move you to the END of the spreadsheet. By this time you might have noticed another cursor, or white box, on the screen. This second cursor is located on one of the two Action lines on the bottom of the screen. This cursor also represents your location. This time, rather than representing your location on the spreadsheet, the Action Cursor represents your location on the Action Menu. The Action Menu is how you will select some of the various options that FreeCalc offers. To move the Action Cursor you press the `F9' function key (located at the lower-left side of the keyboard) to move left, and the `F10' function key to move right. To select one of the actions move the Action cursor so that it is over the desired word. Then press the `ENTER' key. To speed things up a bit, you can also just type the first letter of the desired action when the Action Menu is displayed. (15) At this point you might want to try moving both of the cursors around until you are comfortable with how this part of FreeCalc works. If you select something on the Action Menu but later want to cancel your request and return to the Action Menu press the gray `Esc' key (located in the upper-left part of the keyboard). (16) DEMO 1 DEMO1 is a sample spreadsheet which has been included to help you get a feel for how spreadsheets work. People who have used spreadsheets before might want to skip this section. It is assumed that you have already read the section called "Getting Started". To examine DEMO1 we need to first get the FreeCalc program started. If you have not already done so, put the FreeCalc diskette in drive A and type the letters "FC", and press the ENTER key. The start-up screen will appear first. When you are ready to continue press any key. The screen will have the numbers 1 to 7 across the top. These numbers represent the "names" of the columns. On the left side of the screen are the numbers 1 to 20. These numbers repre- sent "names" for the rows. FreeCalc has 250 rows and 50 columns. This allows for 12,500 "cells", or places where informa- tion can be stored. The white box in row 1, column 1 is called a cursor. Along the bottom of the screen is the two line Action Menu. The Action Menu also has a white box called an Action Cursor. What we want to do now is to load the spreadsheet called DEMO1. Load. There are two ways of (17) invoking the Load option. One is to move the Action Cursor over to where the word "Load" is, and press then ENTER key. The other way is to simply type the letter "L", for "Load". You may now select the "Load" option in either of the above mentioned ways. The Action Menu has now been replaced with the Load Menu. We are given two options here. First we can load a file. The second option is "Display directory" of files on your disk. Since we can also load files from the directory option, we will select that option now (we could have selected the load option at which point we would have been asked for the name of the file we wanted to load). You can select the directory option by moving the action cursor over to the words "Display directory" (by pressing the F10 function key), or be typing the letter "D". You may now select the directory option in either of the two ways. FreeCalc will default to displaying a directory of only spreadsheet files (the names of spreadsheets always end in ".FC"). Since this is what we want for this demo, all you need to do is to press the ENTER key. The directory will display free space (in bytes) left on your disk. It will also list the filenames of each of your spreadsheets, the number of bytes each file occupies, and the date and time they were create or last revised. You can move the cursor around on (18) the screen using the UP, DOWN, LEFT, and the RIGHT arrow keys, as well as the HOME, END, PGUP, and PGDN keys. You can use these keys to "point" to the spreadsheet file you want to load. To load the file, move the cursor so that the filename "DEMO1.FC" is highlighted. Press the "1" key. Once FreeCalc has accepted the name for the spreadsheet, a message will appear on the screen informing you that the file is being loaded. After the file has been read into your computer's memory, another message will be added to the screen informing you that FreeCalc is recalculating the values of the formulas from the spreadsheet. Once these two functions have been completed, the spreadsheet will appear on the screen, and you will be returned to the Action Menu. Cursor movement keys. The white box located in row 1 column 1 when you loaded DEMO1 is called the spreadsheet cursor (or just cursor). You can move the cursor around on the screen in a variety of ways. The arrow keys (UP, DOWN, LEFT and RIGHT) will move the cursor as expected. The HOME key will move the cursor to the top left corner of the screen. The END key will move the cursor to the bottom right corner of the screen. Press the END key now to see the cursor move. Press the HOME key to return the cursor to the top of the screen. The PgUp (Page Up) key will move (19) the cursor up one screen (unless you are at Row 1). The PgDn (Page Down) will move the cursor down one screen (unless you are at Row 250). If you hold down the control key (it is labeled "Ctrl") and press the RIGHT arrow key, you will be moved one screen to the right. The Ctrl and the LEFT arrow keys will move you one screen to the left. The Ctrl and HOME keys will move you to the start of the spreadsheet (Row 1, Column 1). The Ctrl and END keys will move the cursor to the column 1 of the last row used by the current spreadsheet. Help. When you are at the Action Menu you may select the "Help" option if you want some clarification on one or more of the options from the Action Menu. The "Help" feature will provide you with information on how to move the cursor around and how to select an option from the Action Menu. You can select the "Help" option in one of three ways. First, you can move the Action Cursor (by using the `F9' or `F10' function keys) over to the word "Help" and then press the ENTER key. The second way is to type the letter "H", for help. The third was is to press the F1 function key when at the Action Menu. Select the Help option by any one of the three methods described above. You will see the Help Menu. You can select any of the topics by typing in the number and pressing the ENTER key. Once you have finished reading the help (20) text press any key to return to the Help Menu. To return to the Action Menu press the Esc (Escape) key from the Help Menu. DEMO1 is a fictitious home budget. This spreadsheet will total up a household's expenses, its income, and subtract the expenses from the income. You can get a feel for how it works by changing some of the values on the sheet. To start with, move the cursor to the position where the number "650.00" is located. To do this, select the arrow key for the direction you want to move and then press that key. Once you have positioned yourself at the number "650.00" type the number "550.00" and press the ENTER key. You will notice that the "END OF MONTH TOTAL" at the bottom of the "Expenses" column has been changed to "1560.00". This means that your expenses for the month have been reduced by 100 (650-550=100). Also note that the "END OF MONTH BALANCE" has increased by 100. This is due to the fact that we have 100 fewer dollars budgeted for expenses for the month than we did before. You might want to change some of the other numbers (reduce or increase the income and see what happens) until you feel comfortable with how to change the numbers in this spreadsheet. Enter. The labels (the words on the sheet that indicate what the numbers mean) can also be changed. Numeric (21) values can always be changed by just typing the numbers. Alpha values (labels) must be entered by first selecting the Enter option. We can easily change, for example, the word "Food" which is under the "Expenses" column, to the word "Groceries". To do so, move the cursor to the word "Food". Next, select the "Enter" option from the Action Menu. Remember, this can be done by moving the Action Cursor to the word "Enter" and pressing the ENTER key, or by typing the first letter of the desired action ("E", in this case). The Enter Menu will then prompt you as to what type of data you wish to enter. Since we want to enter a word (as opposed to a number) we will select "Alpha". Place the Action Cursor over the word "Alpha" and press the ENTER key, or type the letter "A", for "Alpha". The entry you are about to make will be placed at the location of the cursor. If you find that you are not at the correct place, you may press the ESC key to exit the Enter mode, and then position the cursor (by means of the arrow keys) to the desired location, and then reselect the Enter option. We are now ready to type the word "Groceries". If you make a mistake in the spelling you may backspace by using the gray backspace key (it has an arrow pointing to the left), which is located on the top row, right-hand side of the keyboard. (22) After entering the word, press the ENTER key. You will then notice that word you have typed will appear on the screen instead of the word "Food". If the word we wanted to enter was longer then the width of the column (the default is a width of 10 characters) one of two things will happen. First, if the cell to the right is empty, and if we are not in the word processing mode, FreeCalc will automatically move your cursor to the next cell and allow you to continue typing. If the next cell is being used, or if you are in the word processing mode, FreeCalc will beep when you reach the end of the cell. You might have noticed that when the cursor is placed at any of the cells which are labeled "END OF MONTH..." that a line is displayed under the Action Menu. If you have not seen this yet, then move the cursor to one of the totals and look at the line below the Action Menu. This line is the "formula" for that cell. This is how FreeCalc "knows" what kind of action you wish to perform on a group of numbers. In the case of the total for the "Expenses" column, the formula is the sum of the first expense through the last expense. To get some experience with the formulas let's change one of them. Formula. Just for this lesson, let's say that instead of wanting to know the sum of the expenses, we wanted (23) to know the average of the expenses. To enter a formula we need to select the "Formula" option on the Action Menu. Either move the Action Cursor to the word "Formula" or type the letter "F", for the word "Formula". The first prompt will ask you for the location of the row where the result will be placed. You can type in a numeric value, or use the cursor movement keys to "point" to the row where you want the result to go. Either move the cursor to row 16, if you have not already have done so, or type in the number 16. After selecting the row, press the ENTER key. The next prompt will be for the column where the result will be placed. As before, type in the number, or use the cursor movement keys to "point" to the column where the result will be placed. Either move to column 3 with the cursor movement keys, or type in the number 3. Press the ENTER key to select the column. Next, the the Formula Menu will appear. The first question is what type of formula do we want. For now, we want to use the "System Supplied" option. To do so, place the Action Cursor over the words "System Supplied" and press the ENTER key, or type the letter "S", for "System". FreeCalc will then display a list of the types of formulas that the system can provide for you. We want to compute the average of a group of numbers, so either move the Action Cursor to the (24) word "Average", and press the ENTER key, or type the letter "A", for average. FreeCalc needs to know the starting location of the cells you want to average. You will need to enter the starting row and column along with the ending row and column. FreeCalc will use that range of cells to compute the average. You can enter the starting row by typing the number "7" or by moving the cursor up to row 7. Row 7 has the first number that we want to average. Press the ENTER key after selecting the starting row. The starting column is 3. You can type in the number 3 or move the cursor to column 3. Press the ENTER key to move to the area asking for the ending row. The ending row is 14. Either type the number 14 or use the cursor movement keys to move to row 14. Press the ENTER key to move to the ending column area. The ending column is 3. Type the number 3 or use the cursor movement keys to point to column 3. If you want to change any of the starting or ending fields, just press the ENTER key until the small blinking cursor is moved to that field. Once you are satisfied with the starting and ending values, press the ESC key to inform FreeCalc that you have completed your selections. FreeCalc will examine the new formula, and compute the new result. The number that will appear for the "END OF MONTH TOTAL" will now be the average rather than the sum of column 3. If you (25) have not changed any of the numbers in column 3 from their original values the average will be 207.50. If you have changed some of the values in column 3, the average you create will of course, be different. You have now successfully entered a formula into a FreeCalc spreadsheet! You might want to play with this spreadsheet for a bit before proceeding to the next spreadsheet (DEMO2). DEMO2 will build on what you have learned in DEMO1. Quit. If you want to end this session with FreeCalc you must first return to the Action Menu from wherever you are at (this can be done by pressing the ESC key). Once you are at the Action Menu you will need to select the "Quit" option. Just as you can with all options, you can select the option in one of two ways. First, you can move the Action Cursor to the word "Quit" and then press the ENTER key. Or you can type the letter "Q", for quit. The Quit Menu will ask if you are certain that you want to end this session. Type the letter "Y", for "Yes". (26) DEMO 2 DEMO1 can give you an idea of what a spreadsheet can do. The problem with DEMO1 is that it is very limited. First, it is only one month. You might want to look at several months at a time. Second, it does not take into account that you may have income left over from the previous month to help you meet the expenses of the current month. DEMO2 will deal with these two issues and will allow you to examine a couple of other features of FreeCalc. GETTING STARTED. If FreeCalc is not currently running on your computer, get it started and load the spreadsheet DEMO2 (if you are not sure how to do this see the earlier section on loading a file in DEMO1 - remember to load DEMO2 and not DEMO1). If you are currently running FreeCalc then return to the Action Menu and select the "Load" option. At the Load Menu you will want to select the "Load" option. If you currently have a spreadsheet loaded, FreeCalc will ask you if you want to continue. This is a safety feature. When loading a spread- sheet any sheet that is already loaded will be cleared from your computer's memory (it will still exist on your disk if you have saved it though). If you made a lot of changes and have not saved the sheet, you would lose those changes (27) if you tried to load another sheet. This feature just allows you to stop the loading process and save a sheet, if you wish. For our purposes, we will select to continue. Type the letter "Y", for yes, continue. FreeCalc will ask that you wait while it is performing its task (FreeCalc will erase the old spreadsheet from memory). Once this is completed you will be prompted for the name of the spreadsheet that you want to load. Enter "DEMO2" for this example. After DEMO2 is loaded you might notice something a bit different than DEMO1. DEMO2 is a larger spreadsheet than was DEMO1. As a result, we have less free space in this sheet than in DEMO1 (you can see the amount of free space available by looking at the center of the bottom line on the screen). You need not worry about the amount of free space on this sheet, but you might want to watch this amount on really large sheets if you have a machine with only 256KB of RAM (Random Access Memory). Once only 500 bytes of memory is left, FreeCalc will blink the amount of free memory. DEMO2 offers a couple of features that DEMO1 did not have. First of all, you might notice that there are more Expenses on this sheet. In fact, there are more than you can see on a single screen. To see the rest of the first month's budget press the `Pg Dn' key. This will move you to the 20 lines below (28) what is currently on the screen. You can now see the rest of the expenses, the INCOME area, and the END OF MONTH BALANCE. You might also notice that there are lines under both the EXPENSES and the INCOME columns that have nothing on them. This is to allow you to enter items into either of these columns. You might want set up your own home budget using DEMO2. A second feature of this sheet is the item "Left from Last Month" which is found under the "Income" column. This item is the balance (either positive or negative) from the previous month. For the first month, the amount remaining from the previous month is zero. If you move to the next month (press the PgDn (Page Down) key, you will see there is a value for this item. DEMO2 has four months in it, April, May, June and July. April uses rows 1 to 40, May used 41 to 80, June 81 to 120, and July uses 121 to 160. You can move from month to month using the PgDn and the PgUp keys. To get a feel for this sheet move back to the start of the sheet. To do this, hold down the `Ctrl' key while pressing the `Home' key. For this example, let's say that your landlord has reduced your rent (for this month only) by $100. To make that change in your budget, move the cursor to the "Rent/Mortgage" amount ("500.00"). (29) Change that amount by typing "400" (do not type the quotes) and then press the ENTER key. Now press the `Pg Dn' key. This will move you to the second half of the sheet for the first month. Notice that the "Expenses" column has been changed. Instead of "2705.00" it now says "2605.00". The "End of Month Balance" has also been changed. We now have an additional 100.00 at the end of the month ("295.00" instead of "195.00"). If you press the PgDn key twice you will see that the change we made on April's budget has effected May's budget as well. In May we have increased the amount of money carried over from the previous month ("Left from Last Month" used to be "195.00" now it says "295.00"). We have also increased by $100.00 the total amount of money in the "END OF MONTH TOTAL" under the "Income" column for May, and have increased the amount of money at the "END OF MONTH BALANCE" for the month of May. You may already have guessed that this will, in turn, increase items on June's budget, which will increase items on July's budget. You may want to move the cursor around to see these changes as well. Now we can start to see the power of FreeCalc. your landlord gave you a reduction in rent for one month, but we can see the effect of that change in the budgets for the four months we have on this sheet. If we spend $100 less in April, and we do not have any additional expenses May, June or July, we will have an additional $100 at the end of your time period (July). (30) In the real world though, we might find a place for that $100. We might want to go on a short trip in May, or send in an additional $100 on one of the credit cards, or whatever. FreeCalc allows for that as well. You might want to try to enter an additional expense of $100 in May and you will see the $100 that we had "extra" from rent be used for this additional expense. You might want to play around with changing different numbers until you get a good feel for how this sheet is set up. Recalc. One thing you might have noticed is that when you change one of the spreadsheet's numeric values, a message is displayed beneath the Action Menu which says that the sheet is being recalculated. When you have a small sheet this is not a problem because the recalculation is performed very swiftly. But when you have a large sheet with lots of formulas this can get to be time consuming. FreeCalc allows you the option to turn the "Recalc" feature off. To do so, return to the Action Menu. Select the "Recalc" option. The Recalc Menu offers two options. The first is to "Recalc" after each numeric entry (the "Yes" option), and the second is NOT to "Recalc" after each numeric entry (the "No" option). If you do not wish to "Recalc" after each numeric entry select the "No" option. (31) Print. Printing a spreadsheet with FreeCalc is fairly easy. First, return to the Action Menu if you are not already there. Next, select the "Print" option. The Print Menu will replace the Action Menu. There are two possible actions to select. The first action is "Print sheet". Select this action if you do not want to change any of the default print options. The default print options is to print the entire sheet at your printer (you can change these options so that only a range of cells are printed, and/or that FreeCalc will "print" your spreadsheet to disk). For this example, select the "Print sheet" option by either pressing the ENTER key, or by pressing the "P" key. You might have noticed that in row 40 column 1 there is the word "PAGE". When FreeCalc encounters the word PAGE when printing it will start printing on a new page. DEMO2 has the word PAGE for at the end of each month's budget so that we will get one budget per page. You can print a range of cells by selecting the "Change print options" and then selecting the "Select cells to print" from that menu. You can also select to "Print to disk" from the "Change print options" menu. Attributes. The Attributes option will allow you to change the width of a column(s) or the number of decimal places in the spreadsheet. (32) The next option we will use is the option that allows you to change the number of digits following the decimal point. The present sheet allows you to deal with dollars and cents (i.e., 2 decimal places). You may find that you are not interested in the cents, that whole dollars are really all you care about. Return to the Action Menu, if you have not already have done so. Either move the Action Cursor to the word "Attributes" and press the ENTER key, or type the letter "A", for the word "Attributes". Select the "Number of decimals" option by typing the letter "N" or moving the action cursor to the phase "Number of decimals" and pressing the ENTER key. You will then be prompted as to the number of decimal places. You may select any number between zero and six. If you select zero, for example, all computations will still be performed as before. You will just see the result without any digits after the decimal point. The result will be rounded if necessary (the result of "1.8" will be displayed as "2" on your screen). Go ahead and select zero and see what changes are made to your screen. After you have select the number of decimal places that you desire, the screen will be changed to display all the numeric values as you requested. (33) Return to the Attribute option and select the number of decimal places to be six. If you start pressing the PgDn key you will come across some cells that have "greater than" signs in them (e.g., ">>>>>>>>>>"). This is because the value of the cell is too great to be displayed given the current width of the column. The value is not lost, it just cannot be properly displayed. You can solve this problem in one of two ways. You can reduce the number of decimal places so that the entire number will fit in the column, or you can change the width of the column. Column width. The width of any column can be changed be first selecting the Attribute option, and then selecting the "Column width" option. Change the width of column three by entering a "3" as the starting column, and then pressing the ENTER key. Enter a "3" for the through column and pressing the ENTER key. Make the new width 15, by entering "15" and pressing the ENTER key. Now the numbers in column 3 will be displayed without the greater-than sign. Remember that the "Attribute" option only effects the display of the numbers. The numbers are still stored in the computer with the maximum precision permitted by FreeCalc (six decimal places). Save. You may have been making some changes to your spreadsheet and (34) wondered how you can save those changes. You would not want to have to re-enter the changes each time you start using this spreadsheet. To save the current spreadsheet, return to the Action Menu, if you have not already done so. Select the "Save" option by either moving the Action Cursor to the word "Save" and pressing the ENTER key, or by typing the letter "S", for the word "Save". The Save Menu will offer two options; the Save option and the Display directory option. Select the "Save" option by either moving the Action Cursor to the word "Save" and pressing the ENTER key, or by typing the letter "S", for the word "Save". The Save Menu will ask you for the name of the file you wish to save. If you have "Loaded" a file from the disk previously, FreeCalc will supply you with the name of the file you loaded. If you do not wish to call this new spreadsheet the name that appears on the screen just start typing the new name and the old name will disappear. If you want to call your present sheet the same name as what appears on the screen, press the ENTER key and the current file will be written to your disk (respond with a "Y" - for Yes - when asked if you want to replace the old version). If you have changed DEMO2 you might want to save your changes to a spreadsheet file with a different name. This will allow you to later return to the original DEMO2 spreadsheet as well as to later use the version that you had modified. You might, for example, choose to call the sheet "DEMO2A". (35) If you want to write the current sheet to a drive other than the current default drive you will have to add the drive letter and a colon to the name of the file you wish to save. For example, if the default drive is "A" and you want to save the file DEMO2 to the "B" drive you would type "B:DEMO2" (do not type the quotes). FreeCalc also supports the use of subdirectories. For example you might want to save DEMO2 in a subdirectory "sheet" by entering "\sheet\demo2" (you must have first created the subdirectory "\sheet"). If you find your disk is too full to save the current spreadsheet you can select the Display directory option from the Save menu and delete a file(s) that are no longer needed from the disk. This will free up spaces on your disk. The Display directory option will also show how much space is free on your disk. Blank. While using DEMO2 you might have wished that you could just erase a value of one of the cells. The "Blank" option on the Action Menu does just that. After selecting the "Blank" option you will be asked for the row number of the cell you wish to erase. Once again, you can move the cursor around by any of the cursor movement keys. (36) After entering the row number you will be prompt for the column number. Once you have entered that information, the contents of the cell will be erased. You should note, FreeCalc will recalculate (if the "Recalc" option is on) all formulas to insure that the erased value will no longer be reflected in any of the results of the formulas. GoTo. The next option to be utilized in DEMO2 is the "GoTo" option on the Action Menu. This option allows you to quickly move from your present location to somewhere else on the spreadsheet. Select this option and try it out. Let's move to row 30, column 1. After the "GoTo" option has been selected FreeCalc will ask for the row you want to move to. Type the number 30 and then press the ENTER key. Next it will ask you for the column. Type the number 1 and press the ENTER key. FreeCalc will move you to Row 30, Column 1. New. If you want to clear the present screen and create a new spread- sheet (one that you are not loading from disk) you will want to select the "New" option from the Action Menu. To start this option, either move the Action Cursor to the word "New" and press the ENTER key, or type the letter "N", for "New". (37) You will be informed that this action will cause the present spread- sheet to be erased from the screen. The spreadsheet will still exist on your disk if you have saved it. All that will be lost will be any changes you have made since you last saved the spreadsheet to the disk. If you want to continue, respond with a "Y" (for Yes). If you do not want to erase the present sheet, type the letter "N", for the word "No". If you requested FreeCalc to continue to erase the present spread- sheet from the screen, FreeCalc will respond by displaying blank spreadsheet. You can load a sheet, or just start entering a new sheet from scratch. We have certainly covered a great deal in DEMO2. Feel free to work on some of the options covered until you feel ready to move on to the third and final lesson, DEMO3. (38) DEMO 3 In DEMO2 you were able to use many of the features of FreeCalc. One of the things that DEMO2 did not let us do was to write your own formulas. You were, for example, unable to multiply the value of a cell by .25 with the "System Supplied" formulas used in DEMO2. In DEMO3 you will be using formulas created by you. If all you ever need are the "System Supplied" formulas you may want to skip over most of this section. If you do not already have FreeCalc up and running on your machine, then do that now. Once you are at the Action Menu select the "Load" option by either of the two methods. You can move the Action Cursor to the word "Load" and press the ENTER key, or type the letter "L", for the word "Load". The Load Menu will prompt you for an action. Select the "Load" option. When you are prompted for a file name type in the name "DEMO3". This file will take a bit of time to recalculate due to the number of formulas it has - so be patient. DEMO3 is a budget forecast for a fictitious business. The budget includes personnel cost, fringe bene- fits, phone, travel, rent, medical, and equipment cost. Five years are examined. This spreadsheet helps to answer the question "What will be the (39) effect on the budget if you add X more employees?" The current plan for this company is to add five employees a year over the next four years. We cannot just add the straight personnel cost of five employees and be done with it. We have set up certain assumptions about the relationships between employee cost and the budget for this company. Even though these assumptions have been simplified for use in the demo, you can easy see how long it would take you to recompute the budget each time you wanted to see the effect of a different number of employees. Here are the assumptions for DEMO3. PERSONNEL cost for any year is equal to the personnel cost per employee for the previous year times the total number of employees for the current year times 10%. This means that you expect your personnel cost to rise 10% per year. FRINGE BENEFITS are equal to 25% of the personnel cost. PHONE cost are expected to increase 10% per year. TRAVEL is figured in 1986 to be $800 per person. In future years it is expected to increase over the 1986 figure by 10% per person. RENT is a constant $60,000. (40) MEDICAL is expected to increase 10% per year. EQUIPMENT is also expected to increase 10% per year. On the second to the last line you also compute the amount of dollars the budget differs from the previous year. This number can be either positive or negative (you could get a negative result if you laid off some employees, for example). The last line is the percent of change in the budget of one year to the previous year. This number can also be negative. You might best get a feel for this spreadsheet by changing the number of employees for one of the four future years. For example, try reducing the number of employees in the year 1988 to 30 instead of 60. You will notice that it takes a while to recalculate this spreadsheet. This is due to the large number of formulas. A WORD OF CAUTION. If you change a number and one of the cells ends up filled with ">>>>>>>>>>" you will have created a result that is too large to be displayed in the current column width. The number will still be stored cor- rectly by FreeCalc, you just will not be able to see it. You can see the number be changing the width of the column if you like (see the Attributes option for details on how to do this). You can also change the number you originally changed to a smaller number so that the (41) result of the formula will be a smaller number. User supplied formulas. The "User Supplied Formulas" are accessed through the "Formula" option on the Action Menu. Let's change one of the formulas to get a feel for how this type of formula works. At the Action Menu you will select the "Formula" option. This option may be selected by moving the Action Cursor to the word "Formula" and pressing the ENTER key, or by typing the letter "F", for "Formula". You will now be asked where you want to locate the results of the formula. The formula you want to change is the medical expenses for the years 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990. The current spreadsheet does not allow the number of employees to be reflected in the medical expenses. You want to change that now, since you know that as the number of employees increase so will the cost of your medical coverage. Move the cursor to the location where the Medical cost are entered for the year 1987. The number there should be "1650". Press the ENTER key twice to indicate to FreeCalc that you want the result of the formula placed at your current location. The Formula Menu allows you to select either to enter "System Supplied" formulas or "User Supplied" formulas. You want to select the "User Supplied" (42) option. Move the Action Cursor to the words "User Supplied" and press ENTER, or type the letter "U", for "User Supplied". The old formula took the cost of medical expenses for the previous year and added 10% to those cost for the current year's medical budget. What you want to do now is to have the medical cost reflect the number of employees you have planned for that year. The new relationship for the cost of medical expenses will be; "Medical expenses are the cost per employee for the previous year, times the number of employees for the current year times a 10% increase in cost". FreeCalc has provided you with a prompt to enter the formula so let's do that now. To indicate reference to a row on the spreadsheet you will use the letter "R" (FreeCalc will make all entries upper case). To reference a column you will use the letter "C". For example, if you wanted to reference the cell which is located in Row 1, Column 1, you would type "R1C1" into your formula. The formula you want to enter is "(R14C3 / R6C3) * R6C4 * 1.10" (do not type the quotes). Type this formula and then press the ENTER key to enter the formula into the system. This formula request that FreeCalc perform three operations. First you have asked FreeCalc to compute the amount of money spent per person on medical expenses by the company in 1986 ("(R14C3 / R6C3)"). (43) The second part of the formula instructs FreeCalc to multiply the cost per person in 1986 by the number of employees we expect to have in 1987. Given the same cost of medical coverage in 1986 and 1987 this would be all we would need. But we have built in an additional assumption into this model. We have assumed that the cost of medical coverage will increase by 10% per year. To compute this increase, you instructed FreeCalc to multiply the cost of medical coverage per employee by 1.10 (that is, 110%- the current cost plus a 10% increase). Once you have entered the formula and pressed the ENTER key a new value (the value should be 1815.00) will be entered for the cell where we are located (Row 14 Column 4). FreeCalc examines your formula for various types of errors. If you make an error, FreeCalc will let you know and give you the chance to re-enter the formula. Copy. We now need to change the formula for the years 1988, 1989 and 1990. We could enter the formula like we did for 1987 and make any adjustments for the differences in years. But there is an easier way, that is less prone to errors. You can instruct FreeCalc to copy the formula you entered for 1987's medical expenses and to make adjustments automatically so that we have the same relationship defined for 1988's medical expenses. (44) First, move the cursor to the 1987 medical expenses. Select the Copy option by typing the letter "C". FreeCalc needs to know the starting and ending rows and columns to be copied. We want to copy only the current cell. Since FreeCalc has inserted the value of the current cell all we have to do is to press the ESC key to inform FreeCalc that we are will to accept the default values. Next, we have to tell FreeCalc where we want to "copy to". Press the right arrow key to move to the medical expenses for 1988. Press the ENTER key twice to select the current row and column for the "copy to" values. When FreeCalc encounters a formula when copying, it needs to know if you want it to adjust the formula. In this case we do want to adjust the formula (that is, we want to have the relation- ship to be the same for the 1988 medical expenses as it was for 1987 - we just want it to use the 1988 value rather than the 1987 values). Press the "Y" key when asked if you want to adjust the formula (you could also press the "A" key for ALL to have all formulas adjusted). Repeat this process for the 1989 medical expenses. Move the cursor to the 1988 medical expenses. Select the Copy option by typing "C". Press the ESC key to accept the current starting (45) and ending rows and columns. Move the cursor to the 1989 medical expenses by pressing the RIGHT arrow key. Press the ENTER key twice to select the current row and column. Adjust the formula by pressing the "Y" when prompted. Repeat this process for the last time for the 1990 medical expenses. Move the cursor to the 1989 medical expenses. Select the Copy option by typing "C". Press the ESC key to accept the current starting and ending rows and columns. Move the cursor to the 1990 medical expenses by pressing the RIGHT arrow key. Press the ENTER key twice to select the current row and column. Adjust the formula by pressing the "Y" when prompted. We have now changed the formulas for the medical expenses. You might want to try to alter some of the other formulas so that you are comfortable with how the "User Supplied" formulas work. Insert. Once your spreadsheet is designed, you might find that you have forgotten something. You might want to insert another row or column. This is easy to do with FreeCalc. Move the cursor to Row 9, Column 1 (the cursor should highlight the word "Personnel"). Select the Insert option by pressing the "I" key. Select to insert a row by pressing the ENTER key. Next, select to insert one row by typing "1" and pressing the ENTER key. (46) Press the ENTER key when asked the row number that the inserted line will follow (this will be row 9). FreeCalc will pause for a moment while it is adjusting your spreadsheet. The screen will be redisplayed and you will see a blank line at line 10. Now we can add a row of new information. In Row 10, Column 1 select the Enter option by pressing the "E" key. The data type to be entered will be Alpha, so just press the ENTER key. Enter the word "Bonuses", and press the ENTER key. Move over to Row 10, Column 3 and enter the numeric value 125000. Enter that same value in Row 10, Columns 4, 5, 6, and 7. Move. FreeCalc can also easily move some of the information that you have entered. Let's move the row we have just entered to the row after "Travel". First we will want to make a space for the row. Move the cursor to Row 13, Column 1 (the word "Travel" should be highlighted). Select the Insert option, and then select to insert a Row. Enter "1" when asked for the number of rows to insert. Press ENTER when asked what row it should follow. We now have a blank number 14 where we can move row 10 to. Move your cursor back to Row 10, Column 1. Select the Move option. Press the ENTER key twice to select the starting row of 10 and the starting (47) column of 1. Press the ENTER key to select the ending row of 10. Enter the 7 for the ending column and press the ENTER key. Press the ESC key to inform FreeCalc that you have selected the starting and ending points to be moved. When asked for the row number to move to press the DOWN arrow key until the cursor is at row 14, and press ENTER. Press the RIGHT and/or LEFT arrow keys until the cursor is at column 1. Press the ENTER key to select column 1. "Bonuses" will be moved down to line 14, and line 10 will become blank. Delete. Now we want to get rid of the blank line a line 10. Move the cursor up to line 10 and select the Delete option. Select to delete a row by pressing the ENTER key. Enter a "1" and the ENTER key when asked for the number of rows to be deleted. Press the ENTER key when asked for the starting row (the number 10 should be in bold). The blank row will be removed and all other rows will be moved up one row. Xport. The Xport option will create an ASCII file that can be used by other programs (such as Stilwell Software Products database program FreeFile, or BASIC). The file created will not contain the formulas from your spreadsheet, it will contain the results of the formulas, as well as any alpha or numeric values you have entered. (48) Move your cursor to Row 9, Column 3 (the value for Personnel for 1986). Select the Xport option by pressing the letter "X". Press the "N" (for No) when asked if you want to Xport the entire spreadsheet. Press the ENTER key twice to select the starting Row of 9 and the starting Column of 3. Select the ending Row by moving the cursor down to Row 16 (the value for equipment for 1986), and press the ENTER key. Select the ending column by moving the cursor to column 7 and pressing the ENTER key. Press the ESC key to inform FreeCalc that you have selected the starting and ending value to be Xported. Enter a filename to be Xported (you can use XPORT for this demo). The file will be Xported and you will be returned to the Action Menu to continue your work. The first item you will be asked to respond to is whether you would like to Xport the entire spreadsheet. If you respond with a "N" (for No), you will need to provide FreeCalc with the starting row and column numbers as well as the ending row and column number. The second and final item that FreeCalc needs is the name of the file you want FreeCalc to Xport to. Enter the filename (include the drive and/or path if desired) and press the ENTER key. (49) If you have FreeFile, you might want to set up a database that is made up of 5 numeric fields and Import to FreeFile the file that you have just Xported from FreeCalc. Teach (Macros). One of FreeCalc's more powerful features is the ability to "teach" it a task. For example, you might find that you frequently need to display the directory of the diskette in drive B. You can easily change the number of keystrokes to accomplish this task from 10 to 1. The Teach option (often times called "Macros") will allow you to store a group of keystrokes so that they can be played back by pressing the ALT key and any alphanumeric key. We will teach FreeCalc to display a directory of the diskette in drive B (if you do not have a drive B you can substitute drive A, during this exercise, wherever you see a reference to drive B). First, select the Teach option by pressing the "T" key. We want to name the "Macro" ALT-D, so hold down the ALT key and press the "D" key. You will be returned to the Action Menu. You might notice that the word Teach is blinking on the Action Menu. This is to remind you that you are in the teach mode. Select the Load option by typing the letter "L". Select to display a directory by typing the letter "D". (50) Replace the directory we want to search on by typing "B:*.FC". This will provide you with a directory of all FreeCalc spreadsheet files on the B drive. After the directory has been displayed, hold down the ALT key while pressing the "D" key. This will end the macro (you have to do this since we want the macro to stop as soon as the directory is displayed). Now press the ENTER key to return to the Action Menu. To have FreeCalc play back what it has learn, hold down the ALT key and press the D key. This will cause a display of drive B to appear on your screen. You can now load a file, delete a file, or just check the amount of free space remaining on the diskette in drive B. Return to the Action Menu by pressing the ENTER key. This macro is saved on your default disk and is now available for use while you are using any of your FreeCalc spreadsheets (i.e., you do not need to "teach" FreeCalc the same task each time you start work on a new spreadsheet. Another possible use for macros is to load a spreadsheet that you plan on working with over a period of time. You might create a macro called ALT-L, for example, that will load the spreadsheet and then move the cursor to the last row of the spreadsheet. Word processing. It is possible to (51) do limited word processing using FreeCalc (if you find your need more word processing features you might want to look at Stilwell Software Products' word processor called FreeWord). If you currently have a spreadsheet on your screen, clear it by selecting the New option from the Action Menu, and responding with a "Y" when asked if you want to continue. Next, change the width of column 1 to be 7 (this will be your left margin when printing). This is done be selecting the Attributes option from the Action Menu. Press the ENTER key to select to change the column width. Press the ENTER key two more times to change the width of column 1. Enter the number 7 and then press the ENTER key when asked for the new width. You now need to change the width of column 2 for the width of the document. Move the cursor to column 2. Select the Attributes option from the Action Menu. Press the ENTER key to select to change the column width. Press the ENTER key two more times to change the width of column 2. Enter the number 65 and then press the ENTER key when asked for the new width. Select the WP option from the Action Menu. Normally when entering a cell defined as "Alpha", FreeCalc will automatically move you to the next column once the cell is filled if that next column is empty. By selecting the (52) WP option and entering a "Y" to enter the WP mode, you can turn that feature off. FreeCalc will then beep when you have reached the end of the cell. Select the Enter option from the Main Action Menu, and then select to enter Alpha data. You can now start typing. When you get to the end of the cell, FreeCalc will beep. You can press the DOWN arrow key to move to the next row and remain in the enter alpha data mode. You can also select to center the text you are typing, to alien flush on the left side, or to alien flush on the right side. Once you have completed this final lesson you have been exposed to all of the major features of FreeCalc. You will now, with a little bit of practice, be able to write spreadsheets on your own. If you ever have any trouble, you might want to refer back these lessons and review the areas that you are having trouble with. (53) A T T R I B U T E S USAGE: This option will allow you to make two changes as to how the values in your spreadsheet are displayed. You can change the width of any column, and you can change the number of digits that follow the decimal point. DESCRIPTION: After selecting the Attributes option you will be presented with two choices; to change the column width or to change the number of decimal places. Column width. Column width can vary from 0 (zero) to 70. You can change the width of a single column or a range of columns. A width of zero will create a "hidden" column. The column will still exist, and the value in the column can be used in formulas, but it will not be displayed or your screen, or when you print the spreadsheet. You might use hidden columns when the individual value in a column are confidential, but the total needs to be known. Number of decimal places. The number of digits after the decimal point can range from 0 (for whole number) to six. After changing the number of digits, the screen will be redisplayed to reflect the change you requested. If you save the spreadsheet, the next time (54) you load it from your disk FreeCalc will "remember" the number of digits you requested, and continue to display to screen accordingly. The numbers are still stored by FreeCalc as you have entered them. This option changes only the DISPLAY of the numbers - not the actual value of the numbers. REMARKS: It is possible to cause a number to be too large to be properly displayed by the use of this option. If the number cannot be displayed FreeCalc will fill the cell with the greater than sign (">"). The value will still exist, it just cannot be displayed. You can fix this problem in one of two ways. You can change the width of the column to allow the value to be displayed. Or, you might be able to reduce the number of decimal places displayed so that the number will fit into the column. For example, if you are displaying the number with 4 digits following the decimal point, you might be able to display the number if you change the number of decimal places to 2 (if you need to have 4 decimal places you will, of course, have to change the width of the column). (55) B L A N K USAGE: The "Blank" option allows you to erase the contents of a single cell. This is useful when you have found that you have entered something incorrectly, or when you are redesigning a spread- sheet and want to erase the contents of one of the old cells. DESCRIPTION: You will be prompted as to the row and column of the cell that you want to erase. As with other options, you can move the cursor around by any of the cursor movement keys to select the location, or you can type the number of the row and column. Once you have selected the cell to be erased, FreeCalc will recalculate (if the "Recalc" feature is on) all formulas to insure that the erased value will no longer be reflected in any of the results of the formulas. REMARKS: If you want to remove a row or column use the Delete option. If you want to erase the entire spreadsheet, use the New option. (56) C O L O R USAGE: This separate program (called COLOR.EXE) will allow you to change the color of the characters on your screen. You can also use the program to change the color of the border around your screen. For example, if you wanted FreeCalc to use blue for your normal text and yellow for the high intensity text you would run this program. DESCRIPTION: Insert the disk that has the program COLOR.EXE into your disk drive. Type "COLOR" (don't type the quotes). Press any key to see the Action Menu. You will be asked what item you want to change the color on, and be shown the available colors. Once you have selected all the colors you want to use, select the "exit" option to end the program. The COLOR program will create a file called COLOR.FIL. The file COLOR.FIL needs to be on your FreeCalc work disk. If the disk you create COLOR.FIL on is not the disk that has the program FC.EXE on it you will have to copy COLOR.FIL to the disk with FC.EXE. If you have a two drive floppy system, insert the disk with FC.EXE in drive A and the disk with COLOR.FIL in drive B. Type "COPY B:COLOR.FIL A:COLOR.FIL" (don't type the quotes). If you have a hard disk system, put the (57) disk with COLOR.FIL in drive A and type "COPY A:COLOR.FIL C:" (don't type the quotes). The next time you run FreeCalc, the colors will be the ones you selected. Monochrome users. If you are using a monochrome display but you are using a color graphics card, you will need to copy the file NO-COLOR.FIL to COLOR.FIL on the disk that has the FC.EXE file on it. The COMPAQ and the IBM PC Portable are two computers that have this setup. If the file NO-COLOR.FIL is on the same disk and the file FC.EXE you will need to type "COPY NO-COLOR.FIL COLOR.FIL" (don't type the quotes). If you have a two drive floppy system and the NO-COLOR.FIL file is not on the disk with FC.EXE, insert the disk with FC.EXE in drive A and the diskette with NO-COLOR.FIL in drive B. Then type "COPY B:NO-COLOR.FIL A:COLOR.FIL" (don't type the quotes). If you have a hard disk system, put the disk with the NO-COLOR.FIL in drive A and type "COPY A:NO-COLOR.FIL C:COLOR.FIL" (don't type the quotes). This will improve the appearance of the characters on your screen (you may have to make some adjustments with the brightness and contrast knobs on your display to get the best possible image). REMARKS: You will need to have a color card in your computer to be able to use this program. You only need to run this (58) program one time. Then just put the file the program created (called "COLOR.FIL") on the disk that has FC.EXE on it. When FreeCalc starts, it will search the default disk for the file COLOR.FIL. If it finds the file it will use the colors you selected. If there is no COLOR.FIL file, FreeCalc will use the default color settings. (59) C O P Y USAGE: The Copy option allows you to copy a group of cells to another part of your spreadsheet. You can copy a row, column or a range of cells. The original cells will remain intact (if you want to move the cells see the Move option). DESCRIPTION: After selecting the Copy option you will be asked to enter the starting row and column of the cells to be copied. You can use any of the cursor movement keys to move around in the spreadsheet if you are uncertain of the starting and ending points. The cursor keys allow you to "point" to the cell rather than having to type in the number. Enter the starting row and press either the ENTER or TAB key to move to the starting column. Next enter the ending row and column. You can change any of the starting or ending points by pressing the ENTER or TAB key until the cursor returns to the item you want to edit. Once you have correctly entered the starting and ending points, inform FreeCalc that you have finished by pressing the ESC key. You will then be asked for the row and column that you want to copy the cells to. Enter that number (or use the cursor movement keys to point to the row and column you want to copy to). (60) If you are copying a formula, you will be asked if you want to "adjust" the formula. Adjusting the formula will alter the formula's reference to any specific cell. REMARKS: The Copy option will leave the original cells intact (they will not be deleted). If you want to move a range of cells from one part of your spread- sheet to another, select the Move option. Also note that the Copy option will overlay any cells already being used in the target area. That is, if you are copying Row 1 to Row 5 and Row 5 already has something on it, Row 5 will be replaced with the value of Row 1. If you want to keep the values in Row 5 first select to Insert a row (see the Insert option) following row 4. This will put a blank row between Row 4 and Row 5. You can now copy Row 1 to Row 5 without losing any data that was in Row 5. (61) C U R S O R M O V E M E N T USAGE: FreeCalc uses two cursors. The white box located in row 1 column 1 when you start FreeCalc is simply called the Cursor. This cursor is used to select a specific cell in the spreadsheet to perform some action upon. For example, when this cursor is located at Row 1, Column 1 and you enter a numeric value, that value will be stored at Row 1, Column 1. The second white box on the screen is called the Action Cursor, and it is located on one of the two lines on the bottom of the screen. The Action Cursor is used to select one of the options available to you (e.g., to Print a spreadsheet). DESCRIPTION: The following keys will move the cursor: UP - Move to the line above the current line DOWN - Move to the line below the current line LEFT - Move one column to the left RIGHT - Move one column to the right HOME - Top left corner of the screen END - Bottom right corner of the screen PGUP - Move up one screen PGDN - Move down one screen (62) CTRL & RIGHT - Move one screen to the right CTRL & LEFT - Move one screen to the left CTRL & HOME - Move to the beginning of the spreadsheet CTRL & END - Move to the last row of the spreadsheet Move the Action Cursor by pressing the F9 function key to move left, and the F10 function key to move right. REMARKS: When the CTRL (Control) key is a part of the keying sequence, you must press the CTRL key first and hold it down while pressing the other required key. (63) D E L E T E USAGE: The Delete option will allow you to delete a row(s) or a column(s). Any reference to a specific cell in any formulas will be automatically adjusted. DESCRIPTION: After selecting the Delete option you will be asked if you want to delete a row or a column. Select the desired action. Next, you will be asked for the number of rows (or columns if deleting columns) to be deleted. The last item you will be required to enter is the starting row (or column if deleting columns) to be deleted. At any prompt asking for you to enter a number, you may use the cursor movement keys to point to the row or column you want to use. REMARKS: After deleting a row or column the adjoining rows or columns will be moved over to take the place of the delete cells. (64) D I R E C T O R Y USAGE: This option is used to find information about the files on your disk, to load a file, to delete a file, or to find the amount of free space left on your disk. For example, you are ready to start work on a spreadsheet but you cannot remember the name you gave to it when you created it. Select this option to see a listing of the files on your disk. DESCRIPTION: This option can be selected in one of two ways. Both the Load and the Save options are able to display a directory from their submenus. You can start with either of these options (either the Load or Save) and then select the "Display directory" option from their submenus. FreeCalc will default to displaying the directory of spreadsheet files on the default drive. You can change that if you wish by entering the name and a colon for the drive you want a directory of, e.g, "b:" for drive B. You then type "*.*" to get all the files on the disk, or "*.fc" to get only the spread- sheet files. You will then see a directory of your disk. You will be provided with the amount of disk space remaining on the requested disk. The listing of the (65) files will contain the filename, size, and the last date and time the file was updated. If there are more files than can fit on a single screen you can move the reverse video bar down to the end of the screen to cause the screen to scroll and the next filename to appear. You can also hit the "PgDn" key to move to the bottom of the screen, and "PgUp" to move to the beginning of the screen. There are two actions you can perform on this screen. You can load the file highlighted in the reverse video bar, or delete it. To select a file, move the reverse video bar up, down, left or right with the arrow keys until the filename is highlighted. Load. After selecting the file to be loaded, press the key labeled "1". The new file will be loaded and you will be returned to the Action Menu. Make certain that the file you want to load is a FreeCalc spreadsheet file (the filename should in end with a ".FC"). Delete. After selecting the file to be deleted (by highlighting the filename), press the key labeled "2". As a safety measure, you will be asked if you are certain that you want to delete this file. Respond "N" (for NO) if you do not want to delete the file, and respond "Y" (for YES) to delete the file. After the file is deleted, the name will still appear on the list, but the size will be zero and the date and time of last update will be erased. (66) REMARKS: If you load a spreadsheet when you are already working on a spread- sheet, FreeCalc will inform you that the requested action will erase the current spreadsheet (it will still exist on your disk if you have "saved" it). You will be asked if you want to continue. This will provide you with the chance to save your spreadsheet before FreeCalc overlays your computer's memory with the new spreadsheet. (67) E N T E R USAGE: The Enter option is selected to input values into the spreadsheet. The values can be labels for the rows and columns, or they can be numbers. DESCRIPTION: The Enter Menu first prompts you to select the type of information that you want to enter. You may select either "Alpha" or "Numeric". There are two differences between the two types of data. First, only data which was entered with the "Numeric" option can be used in formulas. You can enter numeric values by using the "Alpha" mode, but those cells will not be used by any formulas. If a formula makes a reference to an "Alpha" cell, either directly or indirectly (by use of the "THRU" format of a formula), the formula will interpret the value of the cell to be zero. The second difference is that only data entered with the "Numeric" option will be effected by the changing of the number of decimal places (see the Attributes option for more details). Alpha. After selecting the "Alpha" option, you will be prompted to enter the value for the cell. Beneath this prompt is the Justification Menu. This will allow you to have your alpha input either left justified, right justified, or centered. You may select any of these options by moving the Action Cursor (`F9' to move left, `F10' to move (68) right). Whatever the Justification is set on when you enter the value for the cell will be the Justification used for that specific cell. This will allow you to change the Justification at any point during the process of entering informa- tion to the cell as long as you change it before you press the ENTER key. When entering data in the Alpha mode, FreeCalc displays the current width of the column along with the location of the cursor within that column (e.g, "Column width is 10, current character position is 1."). Once you have filled the current cells one of two things will happen. If you are not in the word processing mode (see the word processing section for more details on this option) and if the cell to the right of the current cell is not being used, FreeCalc will automatically move you to the next cell and allow you to continue to type. If the next cell is being used, or if you are in the word processing mode, FreeCalc will "beep" to inform you that it cannot accept any additional entries for that cell. Numeric. Numeric values can be entered directly from the Action Menu. By typing a numeric value (i.e., 0 thru 9, the minus sign, the plus sign, and the decimal point) when you are at the Action Menu, FreeCalc will put you into the numeric entry mode. When entering in the numeric mode, you may use only fifteen digits. You can also enter numeric values from the Enter option by selecting the numeric mode option. (69) REMARKS: In both the Alpha and the Numeric modes, you may end your entry with the UP, DOWN, LEFT or RIGHT arrow keys. FreeCalc will move you in the direction of the arrow keys, and you will remain the data entry mode. If a number is too large to be displayed in the cell, FreeCalc will fill the cell with the greater than sign (">"). The number will not be lost - FreeCalc is just currently unable to display it given the attributes for the current spreadsheet. You can change the column width or the number of decimal places to try to display the full number. Numeric values will be accurate up to 15 significant digits. (70) F O R M U L A USAGE: The Formula Menu provides you with two options. You can select "System Supplied" formulas, or "User Supplied" formulas. It is the formulas that allow you to define relationships between the items in your spreadsheet. For example, you might define the cell at Row 20, Column 3 as the sum of the cells from Row 1, Column 3 thru Row 19, Column 3. DESCRIPTION: Select the formula option from the Action Menu by pressing the "F" key or moving the Action Cursor over to the word Formula, and pressing the ENTER key. You will first be asked for the location of the row where the result will be stored. Enter the numeric value or point to the desired row. Next, enter the column where the result will be stored. You will then be asked to select the type of formula you will be using. The two types are System supplied formulas, and User supplied formulas. System supplied formulas. This type of formula is probably the easist to use. Included in the "System Supplied" formulas are; Sum, Minus, Average, Greatest Value, Least Value, and Count. You may select any of these formulas and the system will then prompt (71) you as to the location of the starting and ending rows and columns. If, for example, you wanted to average a column of numbers you would do the following. Select the "System supplied" option on the Type of Formula menu. When prompted to select the formula, type the letter "A" (for Average), or move the Action Cursor to the word Average, and press the ENTER key. Enter the starting row and column by either typing the number when requested, or by "pointing" with the cursor movement keys. Enter the ending row and column the same way. Once you are satisfied with the starting and ending values, press the ESC key to inform FreeCalc that the values have been selected. FreeCalc will then solve the formula and enter the result in the appropriate cell. If you enter the same row when prompted for the starting and ending row FreeCalc "knows" that you want to perform some action on a column (for example, to add up a column of numbers). Likewise, if you enter the same column number when prompted for the starting and ending columns, FreeCalc "knows" that you want to perform the action on row of numbers. The only exception to this is when you select the "Minus" formula. For that formula, the results will always be the starting cell minus the ending cell. User supplied formulas. This type of formula is a bit harder to use, but (72) will provide you with great power. The "User Supplied" formulas allow an added flexibility to generating formulas. A formula can be as complex as you like, with multiple levels of nested paren- theses permitted. The only limitation is that the formula not contain more that 56 characters (this includes spaces). The formulas do not have to contain location of cells on the spreadsheet. For example, the formula "5 + 1 * 6 + (3 + (4 * .25))" is permitted. You may also use the "System Supplied Functions" - "Sum" and "Ave" (average) in the formulas you create. An example is, "SUM R1C1 THRU R3C1". This formula will cause the value of Row 1, Column 1 and that of Row 2, Column 1 and that of Row 3, Column 1 to be added together. The "System Supplied Functions" can be used anywhere in a formula. For example, "5 * (SUM R1C1 THRU R3C1)". Use the letter "R" for the row and the letter "C" for the column to reference s specific cell. If you wanted to use the value of the cell at Row 1, Column 1 you would enter that part of the formula as "R1C1". You can move the cursor around while you are entering a formula but the location of the cursor will not be entered into the formula as it is for the "System Supplied" formulas. All "User Supplied" formulas are edited by FreeCalc to catch some of the (73) common types of errors. If, for example, you do not have the same number of left parentheses as you do right parentheses you will receive an error message. You will then be given the chance to correct the formula. REMARKS: When using the "THRU" feature in any of your formulas, if you enter different rows and columns for the starting and ending points, FreeCalc will take the location of the two cells which were specified by the start and end locations to perform the requested action on. For example, if you entered a formula to sum Row 1, Column 1 thru Row 10, Column 10, FreeCalc will assume you mean to add the value in Row 1, Column 1 and Row 10, Column 10 (and not to add all the values in the range of Row 1, Column 1 thru Row 10, Column 10). (74) G O T O USAGE: Quickly moving from your present location to another point in the spreadsheet can accomplished by the use of the "GoTo" option. DESCRIPTION: When this option is selected, FreeCalc will prompt you to enter the row and column that you wish to move to. Your new location will then be displayed on the screen. REMARKS: You can also use the cursor movement keys to move around in your spreadsheet (see the cursor movement section for more details). (75) H E L P USAGE: To provide you with quick aid without having to turn to your manual. For example, you have forgotten what the Attribute option does and you want to check it first before using it. DESCRIPTION: Select this option by pressing the letter "H" (for Help) when the Action Menu is displayed. You will be given a list of items for which there is online help. Type in the number for the desired item and press ENTER. Once you have completed reading the Help text press any key to return to the Help Menu. You can then select another item to receive help with, or you can return to the Action Menu by pressing the Esc key. REMARKS: If you are short of space on your disk you can delete the file FC.HLP once you no longer need help from FreeCalc. To delete FC.HLP from the disk in drive "A", you would type "DEL A:FC.HLP" once you are at the DOS prompt. Remember to do this only on your backup copy since you may want to at some point use FreeCalc's Help again. (76) I N S E R T USAGE: To insert blank rows or columns into an existing spreadsheet. For example, you might have created a spreadsheet and later remembered that you left out an item. Select the Insert option to insert either a row or column so that the item can be added without having to recreate the spreadsheet. DESCRIPTION: Select the Insert option from the Action Menu. You will be asked to select to insert either a row(s) or a column(s). Next you will be asked for the number of rows or columns you want to insert. The last item you will be asked for is row (or column if inserting a column) that you want the blank row (or column if inserting column) to follow. You can type in the numeric value, or use the cursor movement keys to "point" to the row (or column) to follow. REMARKS: Formulas will be automatically adjusted to take into account the inserted row or column. Also note that the Copy and Move option will overlay any cells already being used in the target area. That is, if you are copying Row 1 to Row 5 and Row 5 already has something on it, Row 5 will be replaced with the value of Row 1. If you want to keep the values in (77) Row 5 you must first select to Insert a row following row 4. This will put a blank row between Row 4 and Row 5. You can now copy Row 1 to Row 5 without losing any data that was on Row 5. (78) L O A D USAGE: "Load" will enable you to move the contents of a spreadsheet stored on your disk to your computer's memory so that it can be viewed, printed or modified. For example, you would select this option to load one of the demo spreadsheets provided with FreeCalc. DESCRIPTION: The Load Menu offers two options. You can load a file, or display a directory (you can load or delete a file directly from the directory display screen). If you request that a file be loaded and you already have a spread- sheet on the screen, FreeCalc will ask if you want to continue. The reason for this is that when loading a file, the old file is erased from the memory of the computer. The old file still exists on your disk (if it has been saved to the disk at some point), but any changes you have made since the last time you saved the spreadsheet will be lost if you load. If you have made no changes, or if you do not care to save the changes you have made, then you should select to continue. If you want to save the current file before loading another, respond "No" and you will be returned to the Action Menu. You can then select the Save option to save the current spread- sheet. (79) If the file name you requested to be loaded is not on the disk, you will receive a message from FreeCalc and be given the chance to re-enter the name of the file. If you do not want to continue at this point, you may press the `Esc' key to return to the Action Menu. If the file you wish to load is on a drive other than the default drive, you will have to add the drive letter and a colon to the name that you enter. For example, let's say we wanted to load the file DEMO3. The default drive is the "A" drive but the diskette that DEMO3 is on is in the "B" drive. You will have to respond to the prompt with the filename "B:DEMO3". You can also use subdirectories (path names). REMARKS: Spreadsheet created with versions 1.0 and 1.01 of FreeCalc will need to be "converted" before loading into version 2.0 or later of FreeCalc. Use the program One2Two to convert your old spreadsheet to the new format automatically. If you are not certain if a spreadsheet in a version 1.0 or a 2.0, you can try to load it. If what is loaded looks incorrect, you can then try to convert the spreadsheet using One2Two. You will not hurt anything by trying to load an incorrect version of the spread- sheet (just don't save the 1.0 or 1.01 version with version 2.0 until they have converted). (80) M O V E USAGE: To move a group of cells from one part of the spreadsheet to another. You can move a row, column or a range of cells. DESCRIPTION: After selecting the Move option you will be asked to enter the starting row and column. You can use any of the cursor movement keys (see the Cursor movement section for more info) to move around in the spreadsheet if you are uncertain of the starting and ending points. The cursor keys allow you to "point" to the cell rather than having to type in the number. Enter the starting row and press either the ENTER or TAB key to move to the starting column. Next, enter the ending row and column number. You can change any of the starting or ending points by pressing the ENTER or TAB key until the cursor returns to the item you want to edit. Once you have correctly entered the starting and ending points, press the ESC key. You will be asked for the row you want to move the cells to. Enter that number (or use the cursor movement keys to point to the row you want to move to). You will then be asked for the column number. Type that number and press ENTER. (81) If you are moving a formula, you will be asked if you want to "adjust" the formula. Adjusting the formula will alter the formula's reference to any specific cell. REMARKS: The original cells will be erased. If you want to leave the original cells intact, see the Copy option. You will need to have blank cells in your spreadsheet to "move" the cells to. If you do not, FreeCalc will overlay the old cells with the new ones (see the Insert option for information on how to insert blank cells). (82) N E W USAGE: The "New" option will allow you to clear the present screen and start a new spreadsheet. For example, you would select this option if your work on one spreadsheet was complete and you wanted to create a new spreadsheet. DESCRIPTION: Select the New option from the Action Menu. If you are currently working on a spreadsheet, FreeCalc will inform you that the current work will be lost. As long as everything you want has been saved to your disk you can continue. If not, then you will want to respond "No" to the prompt asking if you want to continue. FreeCalc will clear the spreadsheet and a blank spreadsheet will be displayed on the screen. REMARKS: You only need to use this option if you have been working on a spreadsheet and you now want to start a new spreadsheet from scratch. If you load a spreadsheet from disk, the old spreadsheet will be erased from the FreeCalc's memory automatically and this step will not be needed. (83) P R I N T USAGE: The Print option will create a "hard copy" (i.e., a printed copy) of your spreadsheet. You can select to send the copy of your spreadsheet to your printer, or select to "print to disk". DESCRIPTION: The Print Menu has two options. The first option is "Print sheet". This option will start the printing of the spreadsheet. If you want to print only a portion of your spread- sheet, or if you want to "print to disk", you will need to select "Change print option" from the Print Menu. If you are uncertain as to what you want to do, select the "Print sheet" option the first time you print. This will print out the sheet, and if you later decide that you want to change the print options, you can always do it and reprint the spreadsheet. If you select to change the print options, FreeCalc will present you with the Change Print Options Menu. There are two options on this menu. First, to change the cells to print, the second, to print to disk. To change the cells to print, select that option, and then enter the starting row and column along with the ending row and column to print. Press the ESC key when you have selected the desired range of cells. You will then be returned to the Print Menu, (84) where you can select the "Print sheet" option. If you want to print to disk, you will have to select that option, and then enter a filename. This will create an ASCII file that will look just like the printed spreadsheet. Some dot matrix printers will allow you to print in a "compressed mode". This means that the printer will print smaller letters so that you can get more information on a single line. You might be able to change your printer from printing 80 characters on a line to printing 137 characters. You might want to check to see if your printer has a compress mode if you have a wide spreadsheet that you want to print on a 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper. REMARKS: You can insert the word "PAGE" to cause a page break to occur at any point in your spreadsheet. The word must be entered under the alpha mode of the Enter option. The word "PAGE" must be entered in all caps. If you find a series of greater than signs (">") on your printed spreadsheet, FreeCalc is informing you that the value of the cell it was trying to print is too large to print given the current setting on the Attribute option (column width and the number of decimal places). To correct this problem, either change the width of the column or the number of decimal places (see the Attribute option for more information). (85) The "print to disk" option can be used to create an ASCII file of your spreadsheet. This file can then be used by many word processing programs. This features allows you to transfers data from FreeCalc to your word processing program. You can also use this feature to create a file that can be used by utility programs such as Sideways, which will alter how the spreadsheet will be printed (Sideways can rotate the spreadsheet be 90 degrees so that the spreadsheet is printed "sideways"). (86) Q U I T USAGE: The "Quit" option is selected when we have completed the work that we wanted to do during this session with FreeCalc. DESCRIPTION: FreeCalc will prompt you to insure that you do in fact want to quit if you are currently working on a spreadsheet. This is a safety feature. It serves to remind you to save your sheet before quitting if you have made any changes that you want to retain. REMARKS: FreeCalc will only verify that you do in fact want to end the session when you are working on a spreadsheet. If the spreadsheet is blank, you will be not be asked to verify your intentions to quit. (87) R E C A L C USAGE: Every time a number or a formula is entered FreeCalc will evaluate all formulas in the spreadsheet. This is done so that you can see the effect of changing any one number on the entire spreadsheet. You can select the Recalc option from the Action Menu to turn this feature either on or off. For example, you might have a large spreadsheet that you have to do some work on. You might not want to pause each time you enter a numeric value to allow FreeCalc to reevaluate each formula. The solution is to set the Recalc option to the "Off" setting. After all your entries have been made, select the Recalc option once again and change the setting back to "On". Your spreadsheet will then be redisplayed. DESCRIPTION: At times it is not desirable to have the formulas reevalu- ated after each numeric entry. If you are entering many numbers you might not be interested in the effect a single number has on the spreadsheet. You just want to enter the numbers quickly. You can turn off the "Recalc" feature by selecting the "Recalc" option from the Action Menu and selecting "No" at the Recalc Menu. You should remember to turn "Recalc" back on before trying to evaluate the effects of the numbers you have entered. (88) When the recalc option is off you can cause your spreadsheet to be reevaluated without having to turn the recalc option back on by pressing the "!" (exclamation point). REMARKS: The normal (or "default") setting is for FreeCalc to recalc each formula every time a numeric value is entered or a formula is created. FreeCalc supports the Intel 8087 and the 80287 math coprocessor chips. If your computer has one of these chips installed, FreeCalc will automatically use it. The resulting recalculations will be very much faster. You do not need to do anything to take advantage of this feature. Forward references. FreeCalc evaluates each formula starting with Row 1, Column 1 and working thru each column in Row 1 before moving on to Row 2, Column 1. You can greatly improve your spreadsheet's performance by not making any forward references. A forward reference is created when a formula refers to a cell that is to the right, and/or below, the location of the formula. For example, if you had a formula that was located a Row 1, Column 1 and it referenced the value of a formula that was at Row 10, Column 1 you would have made a forward reference. Since FreeCalc has not yet solved the formula in Row 10, Column 1, FreeCalc will reevaluate the entire spreadsheet a second time to insure that the correct (89) result of the formula is obtained. If the formula in Row 10, Column 1 references a formula in Row 20, Column 1 another forward reference is made and FreeCalc will have to reevaluate the spreadsheet three times. You can see how will slow things down a bit. In general, it is a good practice not to make any forward references when creating your spreadsheets. This can be done by placing your formulas in the spreadsheet so that the cells that they reference will always be above and to the left of the formula. If you have contributed a donation for your copy of FreeCalc, you will have been supplied a copy of The FreeCalc Auditor. One of the features of this program is to find forward references and to list them for you. If you find this all a little confusing, rest assured that it is! FreeCalc attempts to help you out by continually making passes through the spreadsheet until there are no more forward references. If you have a spreadsheet with a forward reference it will take longer to recalculate the formulas after each entry, but with FreeCalc, the result will always be correct. You are advised not to make forward references only because it will take longer to recalculate the formulas. If you don't mind the extra time caused by making forward references then don't worry about using them. (90) Circular references. A second more serious type of problem is the circular reference. For example, create a formula at Row 1, Column 1. The formula will be "R1C1 + 1". The formula refers to itself (the formula is located at Row 1, Column 1 yet it refers to Row 1, Column 1 in the formula). This is known as a circular reference. FreeCalc will return the value of 2 for the above formula. FreeCalc will always evaluate the formula as soon as you create it. The first time the formula is evaluated FreeCalc looks at cell Row 1, Column 1 and determines that it has no value yet so it substitutes the value of zero. It then adds zero to 1 and gets the value of 1. If the recalc option is set on (On is the default setting), FreeCalc will evaluate the formula once again. This time, it will look at the value of Row 1, Column 1 and determine that its value is 1, and it will then add that value to 1 and return the value of the formula as 2. You might think that a circular reference is never of value and that FreeCalc should therefore simply not allow one to be entered. In fact, that is usually the case, but it is possible to use circular references to "step" through a calculation. That is, you might create a formula that will increase by 1 each time a recalculation occurs. This formula might be used by (91) other formulas to alter their results by one each time. By press the ! (exclamation point), FreeCalc will recalculate the formula again and you can see the effect of increasing the value of the first formula by 1. If you do not like the result, you can continue to press the exclamation point until you find the desired result. You might use such a method to evaluate different interest rates, for example. In general, it is a good practice not to make any circular references when creating your spreadsheets unless you really know what you are doing. If you have contributed a donation for your copy of FreeCalc, you will have been supplied a copy of The FreeCalc Auditor. One of the features of this program is to find circular references and to list them for you. (92) S A V E USAGE: To write a spreadsheet to a diskette you will want to use the "Save" option. This option will allow you to store a spreadsheet on a disk for later use. DESCRIPTION: The Save Menu has two options. You can save a spreadsheet, or display a directory (see the Directory option for more info). When you save a spreadsheet, FreeCalc will save the spreadsheet on the current drive, in the current subdirectory. If you want FreeCalc to store your spreadsheet elsewhere, you will need to include that information when asked to name the file to be saved. For example, if your spreadsheet named EXPENSES was to be saved to your B drive, you would type "b:expenses". You will not need to type an extension (the extension is the period and up to three letters that can follow the filename), since FreeCalc will always use the extension ".FC". If, for example, you wanted to save the file "DEMO1" to the B drive you should type "B:DEMO1". If the file you want to save was loaded from your disk FreeCalc will place the name of the file you loaded on the prompt line. If you want to replace the disk version of the spreadsheet with (93) the current version just press the ENTER key and FreeCalc will prompt you to ensure that you do in fact want to replace the version that is on the disk. If you want to call the spreadsheet something different, just start typing the new name and the old name will disappear from the screen. The old spreadsheet will remain unchanged on your disk. REMARKS: If you want to save a spread- sheet to disk so that you can use it by another program (e.g, Stilwell Software Products's database program FreeFile), you will need to use the Xport option (see the Xport option for more informa- tion). (94) T E A C H (M A C R O S) USAGE: You can assign a sequence of keystrokes to a single key, thus saving time when performing repetitive tasks (this feature is sometimes called "Macros"). For example, you might use the ALT-D key combination to display a directory on command. DESCRIPTION: First, select the Teach Menu to "teach" FreeCalc to perform some task for you. You will be instructed to hold down the ALT key and to then press any alpha or numeric key to name your macro. You will then be returned to the Main Action Menu. The word "Teach" will be blinking to inform you that you are in the Teach mode. Every keystroke (up to 250 of them) will be recorded and saved on your default disk for later use by any spreadsheet. Once you have completed creating your macro you must tell FreeCalc to end the Teach mode. You may do that in one of two ways. You can select the Teach option again from the Action Menu, or you can just press the ALT key and whatever alphanumeric key you selected when naming your macro. To invoke a macro (to playback the keystrokes you entered), just press the ALT key and the alphanumeric key you used when you named your macro. (95) REMARKS: Macros cannot be "nested" (one macro cannot call another one). If you try to name a macro and macro already exist for that key you will be asked if you want to replace the old macro. For those of you who are interested. All macros are named starting with "ALT" and ending with ".MAC" (although it is not important for you to know the naming conventions used by FreeCalc). Following the "ALT" is a numeric value that the IBM PC used to indicates what key has been pressed with the ALT key. If you are interested in these values, you can find them in Appendix G, under the heading for Extended Codes, in your BASIC manual. For example, the macro ALT16.MAC will be the macro for ATL-Q, the macro ALT17.MAC will be the macro for ALT-W. (96) T H E F R E E C A L C A U D I T O R USAGE: The FreeCalc Auditor will create a report that includes the following: (1) a cross reference for all your formulas (will list all the places your spreadsheets' cells are referenced), (2) a list of all forward references, (3) a listing of all circular references and (4) a listing of all your formulas. It will also create a summary page that will list the number of alpha cells, the number of numeric cells, the number of formulas, the total number of cells, the number of available cells, the last row used, and the last column used. You can use these reports to find out possible errors in your spreadsheets, and to make your spreadsheets more efficient. DESCRIPTION: The FreeCalc Auditor will always create the summary page, you may request which of the four reports to be created (the default is create all four reports). Enter an "N" to not create any of the four reports, leave the "Y" to create the report. After the desired reports are selected, you will be asked to enter the filename of the spreadsheet you want to audit. Press the ENTER key to display a directory, or type in the spreadsheet's name to start the audit. (97) REMARKS: If you find that recalculating your spreadsheet takes longer than it used to, or longer than you think it should, have The FreeCalc Auditor look at the spreadsheet to see if you might have made some forward references in the spreadsheet. If you did, try to redesign the formulas to eliminate the forward reference. (98) W P (W O R D P R O C E S S I N G) USAGE: It is possible to do limited word processing using FreeCalc (if you find your need additional word proces- sing features you might want to look at Stilwell Software Products' word processor called FreeWord). DESCRIPTION: To preform word processing with FreeCalc, change the width of Column 1 (see the section for the Attributes option if you are uncertain how to do this) to be whatever you want for a left margin (e.g., 7). Next, change the width of column 2 for the width of the document (e.g., 65). Select the WP option from the Main Action Menu. Normally when entering a cell defined as "Alpha", FreeCalc will automatically move you to the next column once the cell if filled if that next column is empty. By selecting the WP option and entering a "Y" to enter the WP mode, you can turn that feature off. FreeCalc will then beep when you have reached the end of the cell. Select the Enter option from the Main Action Menu, and then select to enter Alpha data. You can now start typing. When you get to the end of the cell, FreeCalc will beep. You can press the DOWN arrow key to move to the next row and remain in the enter alpha entry (99) mode. You can also select to center the text you are typing, to alien flush on the left side, or to alien flush on the right side. REMARKS: You can insert the word "PAGE" to cause a page break to occur at any point in your spreadsheet. The word must be entered under the alpha mode of the Enter option. The word "PAGE" must be entered in all caps. (100) X P O R T USAGE: The Xport option will create an ASCII file that can be used by other programs (such as programs written in BASIC, or Stilwell Software Products database program FreeFile). The file created will not contain the formulas from your spreadsheet, it will contain the results of the formulas, as well as any alpha or numeric values you have entered. DESCRIPTION: Alpha values will have double quotes around them. All cells will be separated by commas. Each row will be written to the file on one line, i.e., each row will end with a carriage return. The first item you will be asked to respond to is whether you would like to xport the entire spreadsheet. If you respond with a "N" (for No), you will need to provide FreeCalc with the starting row and column numbers, as well as the ending row and column numbers. The second and final item that FreeCalc needs is the name of the file you want FreeCalc to xport to. Enter the filename (include the drive and/or path if desired) and press the ENTER key. You can enter an extension (a period and up to three letters) if you like. (101) REMARKS: Your spreadsheet can be passed from FreeCalc to FreeFile using this option. After exporting the file from FreeCalc, start your FreeFile program. If you have a database already created, you can select the Import option in FreeFile and load the data from Free- Calc. The data from FreeCalc will then be added to any existing data in your database. If the database is not yet created, you will need to create it and then Import the data to that new database. (102) DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY FreeCalc and the documentation are distributed "AS IS" and without warran- ties as to performance. Any statements by the author do not constitute warran- ties and shall not be relied on by the user in deciding whether to contribute to the author. FreeCalc is distributed without any express or implied warranties what- soever. Because of the diversity of conditions and hardware under which this program may be used, no warranty of fitness for a particular purpose is offered. The user is advised to test the program thoroughly before relying on it. Any liability of the author will be limited exclusively to product replace- ment. If you have any questions, or comments, please write to: Stilwell Software Products 1336 East Krista Way Tempe, AZ 85284 (103) **** INDEX **** ! ................................ 89, 92 >>>>>>>>>> ........................... 34 80287 ............................ 11, 89 8087 ............................. 11, 89 Action Cursor .................... 17, 62 Action Menu .......................... 17 Alpha ................................ 68 Attributes ....................... 32, 54 Column Width ..................... 54 Decimal Places ................... 54 Blank ............................ 36, 56 Circular references .............. 91, 97 Color ............................ 13, 57 Screen ........................... 57 Color graphics card .................. 14 Color monitor ........................ 13 Column width ..................... 34, 54 Compaq ............................... 14 Contribution .......................... 1 Conversion One2Two .......................... 80 Coprocessor ...................... 11, 89 Copy ............................. 44, 60 Cross reference ...................... 97 Cursor ................... 17, 18, 19, 62 Decimal places ....................... 54 Delete ....................... 48, 64, 66 Delete a file ........................ 66 DEMO1 ................................ 17 DEMO2 ................................ 27 DEMO3 ................................ 39 Directory ............................ 65 Display directory .................... 18 Enter ............................ 21, 68 Alpha ............................ 68 Numeric .......................... 69 (104) Erase ................................ 56 Exclamation point ................ 89, 92 Export .............................. 101 Formulas ......................... 23, 71 Printing ......................... 97 System supplied .............. 24, 71 User supplied ............ 42, 71, 72 Forward references ............... 89, 97 FreeFile ........................ 48, 101 FreeWord .............................. 5 Getting started ...................... 12 GoTo ............................. 37, 75 Greater than ......................... 34 Help ............................. 20, 76 Insert ........................... 46, 77 Introduction .......................... 8 Load ......................... 18, 66, 79 Macros ........................... 50, 95 Maximum spreadsheet size .............. 8 Monochrome display ................... 14 Monochrome users ..................... 58 Move ............................. 47, 81 New .............................. 37, 83 Numeric .............................. 69 One2Two .............................. 80 Print ............................ 32, 84 Print to disk ........................ 84 Quit ............................. 26, 87 Recalc ........................... 31, 88 Save ............................. 34, 93 Specifications ........................ 6 Spreadsheets .......................... 4 Teach ............................ 50, 95 The FreeCalc Auditor .............. 1, 97 User supplied formulas ............... 42 User supported ........................ 1 Version 2.0 features ................. 10 Warranty ............................ 103 Word processing .................. 51, 99 (105) WP ................................. 99 Xport ........................... 48, 101 FreeFile ......................... 48 (106) ********************** * INVOICE * ********************** Stilwell Software Products 1336 East Krista Way Tempe, AZ 85284 DATE Invoice #86060 *************************************** PRICE FreeWord a word processor, SSP's Spell, a spelling checker, and documentation $49.00 FreeCalc an electronic spreadsheet, The FreeCalc Auditor, and documentation $47.50 FreeFile a database, Rebuild, and documentation $45.00 PC-USAGE a utility program to help you track your PC usage $24.95 PC-TRIVIA an electronic trivia game for and about the IBM PC $29.00 MATH SCHOOL an arithmetic drill program for children $15.00 dMAX a dBASE II utility to compress program files $35.00 6.5% Arizona Sales Tax (Arizona residents Only) ________ TOTAL $ ________ *************************************** You may keep this invoice for your records.