Fast facts This spreadsheet has been written by a different company to Microscript and Micropen , also put out through Amsoft and it certainly shows in the manual which, although lacking frills, contains all necessary information in an accessible form and has even been written with some evidence of humanity! Another wonder for this range is the screen Help menu which summarises all available commands. What it does have in common with the others is that the emphasis is quite strongly on the ability to produce documentation and reports from the data -the program can be used as a basic word processor for producing letters and so on that have selected rows, columns and labels from the spreadsheet inserted into them. It's a nice feature. Surprisingly , the spreadsheet itself does not take advantage of disc filing -each sheet fills 15K with a maximum of 560 cells - this makes it faster that I expected but also throws it into much closer competition with the new spreadsheet written by Campbell Systems for Amsoft. The latter has some very nice touches which perhaps make it a better mainstream utility, and it is also cheaper. Microspread however is stronger on block commands and. of course, text, which will be just what some people are looking for. The formula options did strike me as a bit strange by offering functions such as ArcCos but not Log but its a small point. Files produced by the sheet can be used to drive the Micrograph business graphics program in the same range but this was not available for review. Tony Kendle , Popular Computing Weekly (1985) |