It has been refreshing to witness Softwood, Inc. faithfully and vigorously supporting the Amiga throughout its trials and tribulations. Their newest product, FinalCalc, a spreadsheet program, is truly an inspiring piece of work. It comes attractively packaged as a three-ring binder that fits into its own bookshelf box. Four diskettes come in vinyl storage pouch notebook pages. No light-weight, temporary or cost cutting measures here! My overall impression is of a fully featured application of the highest quality. The substantial manual is very well done, as we have come to expect from Softwood.
System Requirements and Installation
Softwood "strongly recommends" that FinalCalc run on a system with at least 3 megabytes of memory (2 MB will "load and run" they claim). I did not test memory limitations, but I agree one can never go wrong adding memory. FinalCalc requires Workbench 2.0 or higher, but will run with "reduced functionality" on older systems. FinalCalc takes up 5 MB of hard disk space, and cannot run from floppy. FinalCalc uses several system libraries such as the Amigaguide library (on line help) and the ARexx library (for macros). FinalCalc installs effortlessly with the standard Commodore Installer program.
A Quality Amiga Spreadsheet
Historically, there have been several ill-starred Amiga spreadsheet programs. Various earlier attempts were either buggy, litigated into oblivion by Lotus, or otherwise unsatisfactory. It has been somewhat of a joke that the Amiga could do "anything except spreadsheets", which are, of course, one of the staple applications on other platforms. The last Amiga spreadsheet I tried was Pro Calc by Gold Disk (out of the Amiga business now). Pro Calc was quirky, poorly documented, and the ARexx interface was irritatingly buggy. At last, Softwood has developed a major product to capitalize on the absence of a quality spreadsheet for the Amiga. A spreadsheet is a mathematical model builder and problem solver. The user defines a set of variables, data, and formulas, and how they interrelate to each other. Then, the spreadsheet calculates the effect on the entire model if one or more entities change or are updated. Spreadsheets are good for "what if" or experimental scenarios, as well as for keeping track of business data such as sales, expenses, tax information, and so forth. Graphical representation of the figures has also become standard.
A FinalCalc project, as in other spreadsheets, is made up of "cells" which are arranged in numeric rows and alphabetic columns to make the "view" or "sheet" which is one page of the project. A cell is identified by its coordinates. A1 therefore is the upper left hand cell of a view: Column A, row 1. A "range" of cells is a rectangle encompassing one or more cells. Ranges may be copied, cut, and pasted as well as given names. Projects may have multiple pages and formulas associating or connecting their cell ranges. Cells may be "formatted" in several "types" including general (general purpose), decimal (e.g. 1.23), currency (e.g. $1.95), comma (e.g. 10,245), and so on. Cells may contain justified text, data, or formulas. Cell addresses or ranges may become variables in formulas. A cell formula begins with the equals sign (=); for instance if the contents of some cell is to be the sum of cells A1 and A2 then its content is represented as
=A1+A2. The cell in question appears highlighted if you begin typing, FinalCalc enters "Edit" mode and what you type appears in the edit area at the bottom of the screen. Pressing Enter causes what you typed to be input to the cell, and, depending on what format or type is set, and whether this is the result of a formula or just data or text, the results appear in the cell. A status line at the top of the screen shows the actual contents of any selected cell. For instance a line
G2: (C2) =A1+A2
shows that cell G2 is formatted in Currency type with 2 decimal places, and is the sum of cell A1 and A2. In these basics, all spreadsheets are very much alike. The real power of any particular product relates to how easy it is to set up and modify a spreadsheet. This calls for, among other things, an intuitive interface, scripting or macro capability, keystroke alternatives to mouse clicks, ability to fill a range with data, graphing capabilities, cloning of all settings for some particular range so they may be called up for use by another range (these cloned settings are called "tags" in FinalCalc), easy printing, drawing, and printing capabilities. FinalCalc has all these and more, including naming and sorting ranges, outline font support, PostScript or preferences printing, date parsing, regression, database functions, on-line hypertext help, the ability to undo/redo events, full ARexx support, and even animation of its graphs! Since Gold Disk abandoned the Amiga, there doesn't even exist another competing Amiga spreadsheet, yet Softwood has marketed FinalCalc as if they were up against the stiffest competition. This level of effort and commitment to excellence deserves every success.
Demo Projects
Since FinalCalc's manual is several hundred pages, I do not have space to discuss or even enumerate all of its features, but let's walk through a few of the supplied demo projects to get a feel for FinalCalc. These working examples are the best place to start learning FinalCalc's features. The Calendar sheet demonstrates the considerable power of FinalCalc to manipulate dates both as strings and as numeric data. It also showcases its line drawing features. The user may input the month, year and first day of the week (e.g. does the calendar start on Monday or Sunday?). A calendar is generated for that month. The other sheet (viewable by pressing Alt-S) shows the entire year. Named ranges are used in formulas to make calculations easy. To view/edit the named ranges in a sheet, press Alt-N or use the Edit menu under Names. Named ranges used in formulas may themselves be composed of results from other calculations.
The Macros Test Sheet demonstrates several internal script macros. A macro may be written into a range of cells and then assigned a hotkey to activate it. FinalCalc has a set of internal commands that work only within a project, and it has ARexx capability for controlling logic as well as communication outside the project. The macro requester lets you choose Internal or ARexx. It also lets you choose the macro's source as a range of cells, as an external script file, or as a string command. The set of internal commands are transparent to ARexx (they may be used either as internal commands or as the ARexx command set). There are facilities to identify objects, such as project windows; requesters to get information from the user (you can also send commands to requesters from a macro); a macro recorder; and an event trigger to run a macro after a certain event such as a recalculation, or according to a user-settable timer. The scripting capabilities of FinalCalc are exciting to say the least. Softwood has gone all out to create a state of the art tool that is long overdue in the Amiga community.
FinalCalc has full graphical rendering capability as well, as demonstrated by the Demo Graphs Sheet. There are 40 types of graphs that you can view, print, or modify based on a data spreadsheet. When viewing a graph, right click to get a menu that lets you save the IFF file (RAmiga-S) or close the view (RAmiga-C). Graphs may be animated. I opened the Animation List from the menu and tried several animated graphs which worked well save one, called "The Worm", which did not animate for some reason (probably a typo in its script).
Conclusion
The only quibbles I could come up with are that the manual index is a little thin and there is no conversion to/from other spreadsheet formats. Several subjects that I tried to find either are not indexed or listed as subheadings only (for instance Format is only a subheading under Cell). Since you can search for words in the Amigaguide online help, this is a minor quibble that disappears after a few hours of using FinalCalc. I give FinalCalc my highest recommendation. It is one of the best products ever developed for the Amiga. It fills a longstanding spreadsheet void at a time when most developers have jumped ship. Softwood risked producing a "boring" business application when most of the Amiga software business seems to be only in video and graphics. Well, I predict that all that video business will soon be tracked via FinalCalc! It certainly stands up to the best of spreadsheets on other platforms such as Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, and Quattro Pro. On this subject, it would be welcome if Softwood provided a conversion program to convert Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, and Quattro Pro spreadsheet files into FinalCalc and vice versa. That would help to integrate the Amiga into the mainstream business environment (or at least allow one to take work home and load it into FinalCalc). FinalCalc absolutely has no rival on the Amiga, but there is always the larger question of whether the resurrected Amiga can prosper without inter-platform communication and data sharing. In the meantime, we all should admire (and support) Softwood for steadfastly continuing to invest their talents boldly into the Amiga which we all know is the best personal computer ever designed.
