Re: OFF TOPICS: Lotus 123

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

ac127 wrote:
> After QUATTRO PRO DOS (5.5) and win (7)
>
> I've decided to try Lotus 123
>
> I found rel 9.5, 1995 by Lotus and, more expensive, rel.9.8 by IBM
>
> first question, the better choice, the older or the more expensive ?
I have rel. 9 on my home machine, an even older version (c. 1995, and
written for Win 3.1, though it runs on 98) on my backup machine, and
yet another version--not sure which--at the office. I have not
observed any differences among them. (Unlike Quattro, which gets
buggier with each release!) Just check that it runs on the opsys
version you're using.
I was about to recommend trying one of the shows and sales, but I see
from your e-mail's routing info that you're in Europe. I don't suppose
they exist there?
> second question, I like to set text colour white an backcolor black,
> but doing so i get the same scheme when I print a sheet, is there a way to
> have a screen colour scheme and a printer different scheme ?
Is this in Xy? Because I have different screen color schemes on
different machines (most variations on either black on white or white
on blue), but have NEVER had printing come out anything but black on
white (and I mostly print to color inkjets). Unless, perhaps, you're
doing image-mode printing?
Since 1-2-3 came up, and I know we have a lot of editors here, I'm
just going to go a bit more OT with a pet peeve of mine. Spreadsheets
are wonderful inventions. And words are beyond all things wonderful,
but there are times when words are NOT the best way to tell things. We
recently had a Board of Ed report in our town weekly, written by a
very gifted and skilled, but not very experienced, young colleague of
mine. The thing was all about how our school's students did on the
statewide tests, with comparison to the scores of other districts in
the county. Sentence after sentence rang the changes on "we scored
this, they scored that"--for several paragraphs. We were running short
of space that week, and the editor had asked me to look for possible
cuts.
Space or no space, that kind of statistical material doesn't belong in
a repetitive block of text. I opened Quattro, set up a spreadsheet
template, and plugged in the figures. All the data, neatly and clearly
set out, in half the space. In this case, there was no math to check;
it was all raw data. But once before I had a block of text like that,
giving raw figures and percentages. And when I put it in a
spreadsheet, I discovered that the percentages didn't compute. (So, of
course, I had to query the author as to which set were accurate. And
he just replied "OK.")

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx