The Business Master (3rd Edition)

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page 2-1 CHAPTER 2: INTRODUCTION This chapter introduces you to many of the features of FREE & EASY. After completion of this chapter, you will be able to use FREE & EASY quite effectively. You might want to use the remaining chapters as reference material only. What is FREE & EASY? FREE & EASY is a program that lets you organize numerical and financial information and do "what if?" type calculations. As you will see in this chapter, FREE & EASY has great versatility and flexibility to adapt to your needs. Think of FREE & EASY as a large sheet of paper where you enter your data and do calculations. The area in which you work in FREE & EASY is called the "sheet". FREE & EASY has many features which are found in a spreadsheet, such as cells. Unlike a spreadsheet, however, the cells of FREE & EASY are not arranged in a grid of rows and columns. You add cells whenever and wherever they are needed on the sheet. FREE & EASY also includes many aspects found in a word processor, including search-and-replace and cut-and-paste features. You add text to the sheet anywhere you desire. These features allow you to analyze numerical or financial information in your own way and not be forced into a pre-defined format. You establish a format with which you are most comfortable. The FREE & EASY Screen When FREE & EASY is started up, the FREE & EASY screen appears. The bar at the top of the screen is the menu bar. This bar shows all the pull-down menus available. The bar just below this is the cell bar. The left side of this bar shows the cell contents and the right side, the cell name. The bar is empty initially. (More on this bar later.) The bar at the very bottom of the screen is the prompt bar. This bar gives possible actions to take during a session of FREE & EASY. The sheet is the largest area of the screen and is bounded by a double border. This is the area in which you enter all information, do calculations and analysis, etc. Upon startup of FREE & EASY, the top of the box containing the sheet shows "1:UNTITLED". The "1" means that this is the first sheet loaded for the session of FREE & EASY. (We will be working with only one sheet at a time for the first several chapters). "UNTITLED" is the title of the sheet (called this since no name has been given to the sheet yet). page 2-2 Moving Around the Sheet You can treat FREE & EASY like a text editor (and it can be used as one if desired) and just start entering text. The cursor shows the location on the sheet where text will be entered. The numbers at the far right of the prompt bar show the location of the cursor on the sheet. When FREE & EASY starts up, this shows 0001:0001, indicating that the cursor is at row 1 and column 1. Text can be entered in the sheet in one of two modes. In overstrike mode, the new text typed in replaces the text at the cursor location. In this mode, the cursor is a full box. In insert mode, text is inserted at the cursor location, and text to the right of the cursor is pushed right. You can switch between these modes by pressing the Insert key. It is recommended that the cursor be kept in overstrike mode except when you specifically want to insert text. Inside the box with the double border, you see only a small portion of the sheet. The cursor can be moved around the sheet with the cursor control keys, i.e. up, down, left, right, home, end, tab, etc. Try experimenting by typing in some text and moving the cursor around the sheet. Menus FREE & EASY has several pull-down menus as shown by the menu bar. To activate the menu bar, press the "Alt" key. When you do this, two things happen. The prompt bar (at the bottom of the screen) changes. In FREE & EASY the prompt bar is context sensitive and changes according to the situation. The menu bar now shows a highlighted letter for each pull-down menu. To choose a pull-down menu, press a highlighted letter (e.g. C for "Cell") or use the left and right cursor keys to highlight the desired pull-down menu, and press Enter. (You can also press the Alt key and the capital letter of the pull-down menu simultaneously.) Once you have the pull-down menu, you can choose the desired action by pressing the highlighted letter or using the up and down cursor keys to highlight the desired menu item and pressing Enter. At this point you can also press the left and right cursor keys to obtain the adjacent pull-down menu. If you change your mind and decide you do not want a menu item, press Esc to go back to the sheet. In this manual, notation such as Alt-FS is often used to describe how to call a menu item. This means that you should press the "Alt" key followed by the F key followed by the S key. Some menu items have three dots (...) after them. This means that another menu will come up or FREE & EASY will ask for additional information before doing the menu action. Other menu items have associated short-cut keys. For example, the "Save" menu item in the "File" pull-down menu has a ^S beside it. This means that you can also use the control-S key combination to do this action. As you become more familiar with FREE & EASY, you will find yourself using the short-cut keys more often to save time. page 2-3 Try scrolling through the pull-down menus of FREE & EASY and see what is found in each. This will give you a good idea of what is available. A summary of what is found in each pull-down menu is as follows: File: saving and loading sheets, starting new sheets, re-sizing, renaming sheets, printing sheets, DOS shell, screen blanker Cell: adding and removing cells from the sheet, modifying cells on the sheet, adding tables of cells or data View: various menu items to be used with multiple windows and multiple files eDit: search and replace menu items, cut and paste menu items Eval: evaluation of cells on the sheet, modification in the order in which sheets are evaluated, modification of evaluation defaults Range: adding and modifying ranges on the sheet (range functions are special functions described later in the Instruction Book) Help: shows some of the helps available (more on this shortly) Entering Data FREE & EASY has several menus where data is entered or modified. The prompt bar will always give you some guidance in what to do. There are three different situations to consider. One situation occurs when some text (eg. name of a file) must be entered. The second situation occurs where an integer (number) must be entered (eg. maximum number of lines a sheet can have). Finally there are situations where a choice must be made from several options (eg. trig calculations are done in radians, degrees or gradients). Text, integers and choices are always handled the same way in FREE & EASY. We will look at each one in more detail. When you choose a menu item which requires you to enter text, there may be text highlighted which is already there. This text could be a default for example. At this point you can either edit the text which is there or start with something new. To edit what is there, hit home, end, left or right and you can start editing. To start fresh, hit any letter or number or other character and what is there will disappear. You can be in insert mode or overstrike mode just as you were on the sheet. When you have finished typing in your text, press Enter. If you want to cancel, press Escape. In many cases, certain rules must be followed when entering text in a menu item. For example, if you are entering a file name, it must conform to DOS rules. If it does not, FREE & EASY will give you an error message and refuse to accept what you have typed. If you have a menu item which requires an integer, it can be done the same way as text is entered. As well, you can use the left and right arrow keys to decrement or increment the value by one. Usually if a menu item requires an integer, there is a minimum and maximum value that FREE & EASY will accept. If you are outside this range, Free & EASY will adjust the value you type in to the minimum value if your value is less than this or to the maximum value if your value is greater than this. No error message is given in this situation. page 2-4 If you have a menu item which requires you to make a choice from a range of options, you change the option by pressing Enter or the highlighted letter of the menu item. You can also use the left and right keys to change the option. Cells All calculations done on the sheet are done in the cells. Cells in FREE & EASY have some features that are similar to those in a spreadsheet. Unlike a spreadsheet, however, with FREE & EASY you add cells anywhere in the sheet according to where you need them. In a spreadsheet, a variable must be a cell, but in FREE & EASY, a variable can be defined anywhere in the sheet (a cell can also act like a variable if desired). With FREE & EASY it is easy to add text around cells and variables to describe their function, making a sheet easy to understand. When you start a new sheet it has no cells. We will look at some ways to add, modify and remove cells. The "Add/modify cell" (Alt-CA) menu item is used to add a new cell to the sheet or to modify an existing cell. If the cursor is not on a cell, then a new cell will be added at the cursor location. If the cursor is on a cell when this menu item is called up, then the cell at the cursor position is modified. This is the same for other menu items which add or modify cells. The first item on the "Add/modify cell" is "Contents." If the cursor is on a cell when this is called up, the contents of that cell will be shown. If the cursor is not on a cell, the contents of the default cell will be shown. (The default cell is covered in greater detail later in the Instruction Book.) The cell contents are the calculations done at that cell when the cell is evaluated. The cell contents can be as simple as just a number or a complex expression containing references to variables, other cells, locations on the sheet and a number of various functions. When you enter the contents, FREE & EASY checks to make sure that you have used correct syntax. If you have made a mistake in syntax, FREE & EASY will tell you what your mistake is and will not accept what you typed in until the syntax is correct. Next you can add a cell "Name". It is optional for a cell to have a name. If you want to refer to the value of the cell in another cell's contents, you can refer to the cell by its name. When the cursor is on a cell, the cell bar (second bar from the top of the screen) displays the cell contents at the left and cell name at the right. If you do give the cell a name, it is a good idea to give it a meaningful one. This will help you later in debugging a sheet. The format in which the cell's value is displayed on the sheet can be varied. The menu items for this are self-explanatory. This is covered in more detail in chapter 3. Variables Variables can be defined anywhere in the sheet. Variables are used in the calculations done in the cell contents. An equal sign "=" defines page 2-5 the variable. The variable is on the left of the equal sign, and its value is on the right of the equal sign. Once a variable has been defined, it can be used in any cell contents. For example, in the sheet we could define two variables as follows: time=2.4 hours speed=60 m.p.h. We could then have a cell to calculate the distance travelled. Its contents would be: time*speed You can also refer to numerical values in the sheet by their location. To do this, hit the backslash, "\", key while entering the cell contents and the menu will disappear. Next, move the cursor to the location on the sheet you wish to refer to and press Enter. You can press Escape to cancel this operation. After this in the cell contents, you will see the location you chose in the sheet referred to by row and column. For example if you moved the cursor to row 5 and column 10 the following would be entered in the cell contents: !0005!0010 to represent the location you chose. The location you refer to can be made relative or absolute. As well you can refer to a location on a sheet other than the sheet the cell is in. This is covered in more detail in chapter 3. There are other shortcut keys you can use to add or modify a cell. Control-C (or Alt-CC) can be used simply to add or modify a cell contents. Control-N (or Alt-CN) can be used just to add or modify a cell name. The control-R key combination will remove a cell where the cursor is. You can also add a table of cells all at once. More details about these features can be found in chapter 3. Evaluation of Cells When you add a cell to the sheet or modify a cell, its contents are automatically evaluated and the calculated value is printed to the sheet in the format for that cell. However, there are times when you might wish to re-evaluate the cell(s) on the sheet. For example, after you change the value of one or more variables, you might want to see this effect on a certain cell. The pull-down menu "Eval" has several menu items for evaluating cells. At the present time, only three items will be reviewed. (Notice that most of the items on the "Eval" pull- down menu have shortcut keys. Use of these shortcut keys greatly speeds up your work.) The F7 key evaluates only the cell the cursor is on and no other cells. The F8 key puts the cursor to the next cell to be evaluated. This key combination (F7 and F8) can be very useful when following how the calculations in a sheet work, or when debugging a sheet. The F9 key will evaluate all the cells. The way in which FREE & Easy evaluates the cells can be adjusted with the evaluation defaults. This is an advanced topic found in chapter 6. It is possible to get an evaluation error when evaluating cells page 2-6 (eg. division by zero). If this occurs, FREE & EASY stops the cell evaluation, displays a message describing the error and then puts the cursor on the offending cell. Helps The system of helps for FREE & EASY is like having an expert beside you always ready to lend you a hand when you need it. At any time in your session of FREE & EASY you can press the F1 key and the help screen will pop up with the appropriate help topic. The helps are context sensitive; the help topic which pops up changes depending on your situation. There are over 200 help topics. Every menu, every situation where FREE & EASY asks you for data, every warning and every error message has an associated help topic. In any of these situations just press F1 to obtain more information on the subject. The help topics are also hyper-linked. On the help screen, related topics are highlighted. To see the related help topic, just put the cursor on the highlighted text and press Enter or F1, and the related help topic comes up. Among the help topics, some which you will find interesting are: Short Cut Keys: a summary of all shortcut keys Contents: a summary of various categories of help topics Index: a complete listing of all help topics FREE & EASY remembers the last 10 help topics to which you have referred. You can look at the last help topic called up by pressing shift-F1. Once in the help screen, you can go backwards in the helps called up with shift-F1 and forwards with control-F1. When you leave the help screen (by pressing Escape) the help screen displayed at that time is considered the last help screen. Thus if while in the help screen, you went backwards through the help screens with shift-F1 and you then exited the help screen, you cannot scroll forward through those help screens once you re-enter the help screen. You are encouraged to use the helps often during a session of FREE & EASY. If you get an error message or warning, press F1 to get more explanation about the situation. And since the helps are context sensitive, they can be used as a self-teaching tool when you are starting FREE & EASY. If there is something in the help that you do not understand, use the hyperlinks to read on a related help topic. Remember that for FREE & EASY to use the helps, it must be able to find the help files FREE0.HLP and FREE1.HLP. Thus these files must be either in the current directory or the current path. If you use the startup batch file (SFE.BAT) that comes with FREE & EASY, this condition will be satisfied. You can read your DOS manual for more details about this. From the "Help" pull-down menu you can also access "A View of FREE & EASY" and the "Instruction Book". To do this the files required for these (see chapter 1) must be in the current directory or the current path. page 2-7 Using Files All FREE & EASY file-handling features are found in the "File" pull- down menu. There are several file-handling features, but only two will be discussed in this section. Undoubtedly you will want to save your FREE & EASY sheets to disk so that you will be able to continue working on them in your next session. Each sheet that you are working on is saved as a separate file. The file is saved under the name of the sheet. Thus the name of the sheet must be a valid DOS file name (FREE & EASY checks this for you when you give a sheet a name). You can also use the shortcut key "control-S". The "Save" menu item will save to disk the sheet on which you are working. If you have not yet given the sheet a name, FREE & EASY will ask you to give the sheet a name. If you want to save the sheet under a different name, use the "save As" menu item. The file is saved to the current directory of the current drive. If you do not supply a file extension to the name of the sheet FREE & EASY will automatically supply the extension ".FRE". It is recommended that you follow this practice. This will allow you to better keep track of your files--all your FREE & EASY files will have the extension ".FRE". FREE & EASY stores files in its own special format. To load a file from disk, pick the "Manage files" menu item. This leads to another menu which has many features. The "Load file" menu item here is used to load sheets. Some of the other features for file handling include using make files (another type of FREE & EASY file), text files, changing the current directory, etc. These are covered in the Instruction Book in more detail in chapter 5. Exiting FREE & EASY To end your current session of FREE & EASY, choose the "eXit" menu item from the "File" pull-down menu. Make sure to save all your sheets before exiting if you do not want to lose data. Before exiting, FREE & EASY will ask you if you really want to exit. This gives you one last chance to save sheets before you end your session.