Office Unproductivity Series

[charlie crassi]

Now for a brief review of 7300's inplementation of Multiplan ! Which I
purchased for my own business use.  

Some of you may be considering the purchase of Multiplan to run on an
7300. It is part of what they call the "Office Productivity Series".
This may have been an error on somebody's part. It probably should have
been called the "Office Unproductivity Series".

Multiplan has many good features that make it a competitive spreadsheet
product, but not where the 7300 is concerned. I regularly do end of month
reports for some customers which involve over a thousand numerical entries
per report.

With Labels across the top and down the left hand side of the sheet, the
remainder of the sheet is devoted to numerical entries, sums, and 
averages. Voila! For this, the "numerical keypad" was invented.

Enter the 7300 !! In order to use the keypad you must use the number lock
key which renders the arrow keys needed to move around the worksheet
"useless". You can't have both worlds. The only alternative is to use your
left hand (normally used for paging) to operate the Ctrl_E, Ctrl_X, Ctrl-S
and Ctrl-D keys. (Two handed data entry) 

What has been done is to take a fairly good spreadsheet and render it
useless by the funkie keypad arrangement. It takes at least 3 to 4 times as
long to enter just the data as it took with my old CP/M system to enter
the data on Supercalc 1 ! (believe it or not)

My opinion : Save your money and get a package that DESERVES to be labelled
             "Office Productivity Series". I could nerver afford to pay a
             person for the time invloved and still hope to turn a profit.  
             Multiplan is great but the implementation is not !..... 
                                               .... Charlie ....
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| Dare to be Great |
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Disclaimer: I do not pretend to know everything about the software packages
            mentioned above. My opinions are my own and are a judgement
            based on years of using "several" different spreadsheets and
            database packages in a business environment.  

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