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Reprinted from Byte, issue 3/1988, pp. 155-157.

Microsoft’s Macintosh spreadsheet shines on the IBM AT, but is it fast enough?

Excel Extraordinaire

In two words, Excel does. Microsoft has moved its popular Macintosh spreadsheet over to the IBM PC AT with all features, such as windows, pulldown menus, dialog boxes, and multiple fonts, still present. The new version also has features that were not present on the Macintosh version. These include better keyboard, font, and auditing support. Speed is the only remaining question. Is the 80286 architecture overtaxed by the superb graphics, and is the program overly slow as a result? Common sense and conventional wisdom suggest that the program’s performance will suffer for its graphical largesse. But a detailed look at benchmark results yields some dramatic surprises.

The new Excel for IBM systems, officially called Excel 2.0 ($495), follows the original Macintosh version by about 2 years. On either the Macintosh or the AT, Excel is the paragon of bells and whistles. It does so many things, in so many different ways, that it tempts you to spend countless hours merely exploring.

You might quickly conclude that the program is huge. It comes on five 1.2-megabyte 5¼-inch floppy disks or seven 720K-byte 3½-inch floppy disks (you can order a set of 360K-byte floppy disks by a special card). By the time you finish loading the program, you gobble up 3.6 megabytes of hard disk space. When the program is executed, it takes up the lion's share of the 640K bytes of memory that it nominally requires, yet even that is not enough. The program must frequently swap overlays into and out of memory from the hard disk. The frequency of the overlays increases as the size of your spreadsheet increases.

Although the package is popularly called Excel for the PC, Microsoft specifically states that the software requires an IBM PC AT or compatible. Several non-AT compatible machines, such as the AT&T PC 6300, are supported, however. The program can use a CGA graphics card, but an EGA, VGA, or Hercules adapter is highly recommended. In the same way, a mouse is not required but is well worth the additional investment. (Excel supports any mouse compatible with Windows version 2.0.) Since Excel uses up such a large amount of memory, an expanded memory card (Expanded Memory Specification version 4.0) is also recommended.

As for software, Excel comes with its own run-time version of Windows 2.0. If you have a full copy of Windows 2.0, however, you can have Excel interact with other Windows applications.

The Mac Interface on an AT

The most dramatic distinction between Excel and a horde of other spreadsheet programs for the IBM PC is its user interface. Thanks to the run-time version of Windows 2.0 that comes packaged with the spreadsheet, Excel functions almost exactly like its cousin on the Macintosh. In some ways (e.g., keyboard and font support), it is actually better than the Macintosh version.

Excel 2.0

Type
Spreadsheet program with graphics and database support

Company
Microsoft Corp.
16011 Northeast 36th Way
P.O. Box 97017
Redmond, WA 98073-9717
(206) 882-8080

Format
Five 1.2-megabyte 5¼-inch floppy disks or seven 720K-byte 3½-inch floppy disks

Language
C

Hardware Required
IBM PC AT or compatible with 640K bytes of RAM, graphics support, and a hard disk drive. Hercules, EGA, or VGA graphics card and mouse are recommended.
Software Required
MS-DOS 2.1 or higher; Windows 2.0 is recommended.

Documentation
775-page Reference Manual; 395-page Functions and Macros Manual; 38-page Getting Started booklet; 82-page Sampler

Price
$495
($250 for network user packs)

Inquiry 898.

Excel’s keyboard support lets you access every one of Excel’s multitudinous commands and functions without ever touching a mouse. In most cases, the keyboard is fairly efficient – in some cases more efficient than the mouse.

Each menu or dialog box you choose contains an underlined letter. You can quickly choose an option by pressing that letter, or by pressing the letter in concert with the Alt key. The alternative is to press the Tab or Down Arrow key to cycle through the selections.

One problem with this technique occurs in cases where several choices begin with the same letter. The designers did, however, provide a number of shortcuts for keyboard users, and generally, the keyboard support is very good for a mouse-based product. You don’t really need a mouse, but if you get one, you’ll find it is icing on a very rich cake.

Ironically, the one major fault with the interface is not with the keyboard but with the mouse support. I asked a very experienced Macintosh user to try Excel on the IBM to see his reaction. He faulted the general “feel” of the mouse, saying it was too sensitive. (He was using the most recent Microsoft Mouse.) Excel apparently bypasses the Control program that comes with the mouse and offers only limited control over the mouse sensitivity: normal, high, or very high. The program defaults to the high selection. But even at the normal selection, the mouse seemed too sensitive; it was easy to overshoot a target area. Microsoft claims the problem is the sensitivity of the mouse and that you can adapt to the new mouse in about a week. Maybe so, but I hope they can fix this problem soon.

Excel for the IBM also has better font support than its Macintosh cousin. The Macintosh version allows only one font in a document at a time, with three variations on it: plain, bold, and italic. The IBM version allows four different fonts.

Dyed-in-the-wool Lotus 1-2-3 users could adapt to Excel fairly quickly. One possible problem might be the general command style of Excel. In 1-2-3, you use a verb-object command structure (e.g., Copy A1...B5 to C4). Excel uses an object-verb structure (e.g., A1:B5 Copy to C4). This takes some getting used to.

Macros Do Menus

At Excel’s introduction, Microsoft officials said that they were using Excel to build prototypes of new applications software. What makes this possible is Excel’s extensive support for macros. With the program’s exhaustive list of macro commands, you can set up a whole new system of menus and dialog boxes and even control other Windows applications.

Excel boasts many macro commands. However, most of these commands are merely other ways for you to execute Excel menu commands. But even if you only look at true macro commands (i.e., commands that perform a function that could not be performed by any other means) you would still find that Excel has an impressive number of commands.

One of the reasons that Excel has so many macro commands is that it processes macros in a unique way. Most other spreadsheets treat macros as strings of keystrokes. For example, a 1-2-3 macro to copy a cell to the right and move to the next row might have seven keystrokes:

/c~{right}~{left}{down}

where ~ represents the Return key, and {right} the right arrow key. Excel, however, converts the keystrokes into a series of commands. The copy operation would require six keystrokes (Alt-E, Alt-C, right, Enter, left, down) but would be represented by six commands:

=COPY( )
=SELECT("RC[1]")
=PASTE( )
=CANCEL.COPY( )
=SELECT("R[1]C[-1]")
=RETURN( )

Were it not for the equal signs (which differentiate a macro command from a comment), the macro would look like some odd variation of BASIC.

Excel’s approach leads to large macros, but the macros are easy to understand. And in cases where you may just want to play back some keystrokes, there is a SEND.KEYS command.

It would be very difficult to describe the power of Excel’s macros in this small space. Like a programming language, it would fill a book. Instead, let me provide a few examples.

The ADD.BAR command lets you replace the main menu bar of the program with your own. If you are so disposed, you can probably replace the menu bar with a 1-2-3-style menu bar.

The ADD.MENU command lets you add pull-down menus to the preexisting menu bars or to your new menu bars. These menus can have commands that are grayed out or checked, just like Excel’s menus.

The DIALOG.BOX command lets you construct a dialog box containing scrolling lists, radio buttons (a menu of choices that lets you have only one choice active at one time), and other Macintosh goodies.

The EXEC command can execute Excel itself, or another Windows application. Once open, Excel can communicate in various ways with another application. If the application supports DDE (the Dynamic Data Exchange message-passing protocol), you can use an INITIATE command to open a DDE channel to it. If DDE is not supported, you can use the clipboard or the SEND.KEYS command to send keystrokes to that application.

Two commands, CALL and REGISTER, let you access all functions in Windows’ dynamic libraries. Microsoft has very little detailed information on this but hopes to have more information available for developers soon.

Excel has FOR...NEXT and WHILE...NEXT loops, too. You can set up autostart and auto-close macros that execute each time you open or close a particular worksheet. You can also have macros execute at a particular time of day, or when you choose a particular command.

As in most programming languages, you can insert comments anywhere and single-step through the execution of the macros. And unlike most programming languages, you can highlight areas of the macro with various fonts and shading. Your code may look as impressive as it performs.

Mac-Style Data-Entry Forms

Excel has a good complement of database features that are similar to those of 1-2-3. Excel also has a good data-entry-form feature. Data-entry forms greatly ease the process of getting information into a database. With Excel you can create not just a database form, but a Macintosh-style database form. That is, you can use radio buttons and scrolling lists just like Excel itself does. These forms are a little difficult to set up, and they run a little slower than Excel’s normal dialog boxes, but they are impressive nonetheless.

Excel supports data tables in much the same way as 1-2-3 does, which is to say it does not make the job excessively easy. However, once a data table is set up, Excel lets you set up recalculation for everything but the table, thereby greatly speeding up operation.

Finding Your Mistakes

In any worksheet larger than a single screen, auditing becomes very important. Excel lets you give cells meaningful names that you can use in formulas and lets you attach notes to particular cells. It also lets you highlight all cells that are dependents or precedents of a particular cell.

One of the most interesting features of Excel is its Info window. You can set up this window to sit in the background and report various pieces of information about any cell you select. It will tell you the formatting, the precedent or dependent cells, and any notes that attach to the cell. With the Info window set up, you can easily scroll around a worksheet and check this information.

No Three-Dimensional Graphics

Excel can generate a good selection of graphs. These include the obligatory bar, area, line, and scatter graphs, as well as the old favorite pie chart. One advantage of Excel is its ability to do several variations on each of these common themes. The program also features high-quality text fonts and the ability to paste the graphs into Windows Write, the word processor that comes with Windows version 2.0. Macintosh users may be happy to know that macros can now access all the graphics commands.

Unfortunately, Excel cannot do three-dimensional graphs. These graphs are increasingly popular and are included in some of the competing new spreadsheet programs, such as Surpass and Quattro.

This review just barely scratches the surface of Excel’s features. I should also mention that color is available, if you have an EGA or VGA. The program is not copy-protected, and it includes the ability to print wide worksheets sideways.

Head-to-Head: Excel Versus 1-2-3

After reading about all these features, you might conclude that Excel just has to be slow. But is it? And if so, by how much? To find out, I tested Excel on an AT clone with a 6-MHz clock speed, 640K bytes of RAM, and a 20-megabyte hard disk drive. The system was also equipped with a Hercules-style graphics card, a monochrome monitor, and the new Microsoft Mouse. The only software I ran with Excel was MS-DOS 3.1, the mouse driver, and the mouse control panel. For each test, the program and the benchmark worksheets were “maximized” to their largest sizes.

For comparison, I tested 1-2-3 (version 2.01) on the same machine. I was tempted to use 1-2-3 with Lotus Development’s Speedup add-in program, since this program can dramatically speed up 1-2-3. But in these benchmarks, where each cell is dependent, the add-in actually has the effect of slowing the program down by a small amount. Thus, I did not use this feature.

The tests I used were the same as those used in the article “Spreadsheets” in BYTE’s Applications Software Today (Summer 1987). Three of the tests involved a simple 100- by 25-cell worksheet, where each cell was a multiple of the previous cell. The fourth test was the so-called Savage benchmark, which measures floating-point accuracy and performance by using logarithmic and trigonometric functions.

As you can see by the results in table 1, Lotus’s 1-2-3 is still number one in the Simple Recalculate and Insert Row tests. Excel was only 60 percent as fast as 1-2-3 in simple recalculations and was even worse when inserting rows. However, the other two tests yielded surprising results. In the Scroll Right test, where the character-based 1-2-3 should have had a hands-down advantage, Excel was 18 percent faster. In addition, in the Savage test, both programs had approximately the same results and the same error (approximately 10-8).

Excel still has some catching up to do when it comes to simple recalculations. But it is interesting to note that, as you might expect, you can make Excel go faster by decreasing the size of its viewing windows. When I decreased the size of the benchmark window to 2 by 2 cells, the Recalculate speed increased by 48 percent. Also, I was very amused and intrigued when I found that Excel’s results on the AT clone matched pretty closely with those measured on the Macintosh last year. For each test, the difference is less than 10 percent.

Documentation Goes Electronic

The most exciting thing about Excel’s documentation is a program called the Feature Guide. This is a Windows application that runs in conjunction with Excel and communicates with it by DDE. The Guide functions sometimes as a slide show, showing graphics and displaying various worksheets and charts. In certain practice sessions, it lets you try out a particular feature and advises you when you make a wrong keystroke. This is an impressive program and a necessary introduction to a feature-rich product such as Excel. It also is a good example of what can be done with the DDE channel of Windows.

The rest of the documentation is two fairly conventional three-ring binders; one is a general reference, and the second is on functions and macros. A small booklet shows a short introduction and has instructions on how to get started. A fourth, thin book (with disk) is a “Sampler” of very interesting applications. Included, for example, is a worksheet for a new business plan and a set of macros for solving simultaneous equations.

I might suggest that the company add more examples to the Functions and Macros Manual. Several of the macro commands are intricate, and examples of each command would be helpful.

A Rare Product

The only things I might fault in Excel are the less-than-stunning recalculation speeds and the mouse support. But in view of the power and flexibility provided by the program, these criticisms seem empty.

This rare product combines extreme ease of use and exceptional power. It is one of the first products to establish a common interface across the AT and the Mac. I heartily recommend it – for both novice and expert – on both machines.

Rich Malloy

Rich Malloy is a BYTE senior technical editor. He can be contacted at BYTE/McGraw-Hill, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, or on BIX as "rmalloy."


Table 1

In the head-to-head benchmark comparisons of Excel and Lotus 1-2-3, 1-2-3 still maintains supremacy in the Simple Recalculate and Insert Row tests. But, surprisingly, Excel is 18 percent faster in the Scroll Right test. Both programs are in a dead heat in the Savage test. All times are in seconds.

TestExcel1-2-3
Simple Recalc4.482.68
Insert Row4.061.75
Scroll Right47.3855.81
Savage33.0233.55



 
Page added on 22nd September 2004.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Marcin Wichary
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