Beautiful Visualization 1449379869 pdf download

https://ebookgrade.com/product/beautiful-
visualization-1449379869/

Download full version ebook from https://ebookgrade.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Beautiful Things Hunter Biden

https://ebookgrade.com/product/beautiful-things-hunter-biden/

ebookgrade.com

My Beautiful Struggle Jordan Bone

https://ebookgrade.com/product/my-beautiful-struggle-jordan-bone/

ebookgrade.com

My Beautiful Struggle Jordan Bone

https://ebookgrade.com/product/my-beautiful-struggle-jordan-bone-2/

ebookgrade.com

OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook

https://ebookgrade.com/product/opengl-data-visualization-cookbook/

ebookgrade.com
Fundamentals of Data Visualization

https://ebookgrade.com/product/fundamentals-of-data-visualization/

ebookgrade.com

Introduction to Information Visualization

https://ebookgrade.com/product/introduction-to-information-
visualization/

ebookgrade.com

Learning Python Data Visualization

https://ebookgrade.com/product/learning-python-data-visualization/

ebookgrade.com

Information Visualization An Introduction 1st

https://ebookgrade.com/product/information-visualization-an-
introduction-1st/

ebookgrade.com
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
when the bills are due, and it will also generate checks.”
He was also going to crank up a mailing-list program, using a list
of all buyers of new bikes within the last three years—a sensible
project, considering the market for accessories and repeat sales.
Obviously, here, as in other applications, the more information built
up on his hard disk, the more his machines would justify the
$20,000 investment. The benefits of computerization for Edward
Boland might not be immediately dramatic, but with his stick-to-
itiveness, sooner or later they’d almost surely come. Boland’s battles
with computers were to continue. When I caught up with him in
spring 1984, he said he’d bought yet another computer system.
Charlie Bowie: Data Base and Spreadsheet
Remember the customer who was raving happy about his software
—also bought from Sue Grothoff at Clinton Computers?
That’s Charlie Bowie, who, when we first talked, was a vice-
president of Washington Homes and manager of its Southern
Division. He told me he expected two Zenith micros to save his
company perhaps as much as $50,000 a year, maybe more.
In just one month, in fact, his $5,000 computer had already saved
the equivalent of thousands of dollars in executive man-hours.
Even before he and I met, his assistant, behind his back, was
singing praises of her boss and their new machine. “I wanted to
learn word processing,” said Julie Grimes, a young, blond woman
who could have been the secretary in the IBM commercials saying
the advertised product was “a piece of cake” to master.
Gazing at the Zenith—which she and Bowie use for data-base
work, spreadsheets, and some word processing—she said: “It really
comes in handy.... We were both worried. Charlie told me, ‘Don’t
worry. We’ll teach each other.’”
Bowie by now was in the room, and it was immediately clear he’d
won her respect through his brains and dedication, not through the
normal trappings of executivedom. He was bearded. He wore a
sweater and heavy boots and wire-rimmed glasses. He plainly was
the construction industry’s version of the proverbial shirt-sleeves
manager. He must loathe paperwork, prefer the field to the
executive suite, even if he was a vice-president of a publicly owned
real estate company with twelve hundred stockholders. He was in his
mid-thirties. That wasn’t so much younger than Ed Boland, who
himself, interviewed on a Saturday, had worn casual clothes. And yet
the two somehow came across as being on opposite sides of the
generation gap that all the pundits were babbling about during
Vietnam. I could imagine Boland watching M*A*S*H; I could
imagine Bowie, in the right setting, being a mild version of Hawkeye.
He wouldn’t necessarily do things the traditional way, but in the end
no one would care, because whatever it was, he’d succeed. Ed
Boland was a man with a fondness for constants—a characteristic
that in his profession had served him well. Charlie Bowie, I sensed,
enjoyed surprises and change.
Bowie’s company, like Boland’s, had to be good to have survived
so long in a boom-and-bust industry. Everyone needs transportation,
everyone needs housing; everyone does not need recreational
motorcycles or new homes. Across the country, home sales had
plummeted at the start of the 1980s. Washington Homes’ sales had
been almost $30 million in 1980 but just half that two years later.
Yet Bowie’s company had survived the ups and downs since 1965.
The management philosophy struck me as the same as Clinton
Cycles—the lean, mean school. It was early 1983 when we first
talked. Another housing boom seemed ready to explode, and Bowie
was working a sixty-five-hour week, “because we’ve gotten very
busy, very quickly, and we haven’t built up our staff rapidly. It’s hard
to find qualified people, and we don’t know whether the recovery’s
here to stay.” Small wonder that he welcomed his computer as a sort
of financial radar—an early warning system that would buzz before
the bombs fell.
Washington Homes was a general contractor. In other words, it
was just as much in the management and budget business as the
building business.
Bowie and his company didn’t hire laborers, didn’t buy every nail
and brick. Rather, they farmed out the construction to
subcontractors, some of whom, if not policed, could wreak havoc on
Washington Homes by, say, finishing work late.
You can’t do plumbing and the electrical wiring, normally, if the
walls aren’t up yet. You’ve got to keep your invisible assembly line
moving. The sixty phases on Bowie’s “House budget summary”
started with items like “Engineering” and “Water Sewer Charge,”
continued through “Brick Veneer” and “Siding” and went on to such
details as “Fences” and “Trash Removal.” If Bowie was late in
submitting bids or getting what he paid for, it wasn’t a bureaucratic
abstraction. It meant a late house, an unhappy customer, perhaps,
and above all, more interest to pay the bank on Washington Homes’
construction loans.
Bowie, moreover, had to keep track of his customer’s own
financing arrangements. The company’s houses sold for anywhere
from $55,000 to $135,000, but most customers were first timers
who had never before wended their ways through the mortgage
maze. Bowie could reduce his company’s carrying charges if he
didn’t rush homes to completion before the customers were ready
for them.
“We don’t make any money until we deliver the house,” he said,
“so we need to keep track of the time between when people
contract and make application with a lender and how long it takes
for them to win loan approval.
“When our company had ninety or a hundred houses and was
backlogged, it was fairly easy to do manually. But now we have
almost five hundred houses in our backlog.”
Shopping around for a system to handle all those grubby details,
Bowie found that computer stores didn’t treat their first-time buyers
as well as he wanted to treat his. “I looked at computers for a year,”
he said, “and the biggest thing I found was the condescending
attitude of the people in the sales centers to someone who knows
nothing about it.
“I’d walk into a store and give them a written list of my
requirements, and the first thing they’d tell me was ‘Your
requirements are wrong.’ And that was the case until I got to Clinton
Computers.”
Bowie showed Sue Grothoff, the sales rep, his sixty-phase budget
sheet—a basic common-sense rule of software and hardware
shopping. If you’re working with documents, at least nonconfidential
ones, then show them! Do so to a store. Do so to a consultant if you
have one. Explain as clearly as you can just what kind of paperwork
you’re computerizing. Here, incidentally, you can’t compare Bowie
and Boland in an apple-to-apple way. Accounting programs can be
much trickier than data bases and spreadsheets, especially for
companies with unusual circumstances like Boland’s—that is, all
those subsidiaries in a small-to-medium business. It’s clear, though,
that whatever happened, Grothoff and Bowie communicated much
better than she and Boland.
“At this point,” said Bowie, “I was only interested in loan
processing and budgets, and the main thing I was interested in was
budgets.”
He thought he needed above all an electronic spreadsheet. Here,
however, for once, a computer sales rep knew his needs better than
he did. Grothoff persuaded him that most of all he needed a data-
base program—one that would help him track loans on hundreds of
houses. It would store information and rearrange it in patterns he
needed. He might not want full copies of all loan-processing reports,
for example. Instead, he might want just the names of the home
buyers, say, or just the foundation costs of each house. Or he might
want the program to tote up all the foundation costs or perform
other arithmetic, including complicated multiplication and division or
calculation of ratios and percentages. And with a program like dBASE
II that’s possible. Like many of its rivals, it will do some complex
calculations, not just shuffle facts around. There are many books on
dBASE II—yet another advantage and indication of its popularity.
(Two good choices are dBASE II User’s Guide by Adam B. Green and
Everyman’s Database Primer featuring dBASE II by Robert Byers.)
Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your
records if you’re an executive like Bowie:
1. The CREATE command lets you begin a file.
2. A file in a data base is the electronic version of a file drawer or
cabinet. It’s just the space on the disks holding records—say, the
house-budget summaries for your homes.
3. A field is a category of fact like the amount of money spent on
each air-conditioning system for each house.
4. Structure is simply the way a record is set up. There are three
big considerations—the field names, the field width, and the
field type. The field name is simply a field’s title. The field width
is the number of spaces required for the information in each field.
The field type can be one of these categories:
a. A numeric field—just numbers
 b. A character field or alphanumeric field—numbers, letters,
question marks, miscellaneous symbols like “@,” or spaces
between letters or numbers
c. A logical field—one with just two choices, like “Y” for “Yes”
and “N” for “No”
5. The EDIT command changes the contents of a data field. You can
type in modifications after putting your cursor in the right place.
6. A command to APPEND can add new records to your electronic
filing cabinet.
7. Sorting lets you reshuffle records alphabetically, by date or other
ways, just as you would index cards.
8. The LIST command tells dBASE II to flash across the screen the
records that you specify.
9. .AND. helps you narrow down the information you’re looking for
or changing. Consider this hypothetical example: LIST FOR
SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .AND. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would
guide you to all houses that a sales rep named Babbitt sold to a
customer borrowing exactly $70,000.
10. .OR. is another way to describe the desired facts. LIST FOR
SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .OR. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would
indicate you wanted to see records involving either Babbitt or a
loan of $70,000.
11. LIST FOR .NOT. SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ could help weed from
view, or the files, all records involving Babbitt.
12. Command files are programs that tell the machine how to
manipulate the data so you needn’t repeat complicated
procedures one by one. You might work out these files to simplify
your secretary’s work—or he or she might do the same for you.

Bowie and Grimes mastered dBASE II basics in eight hours of

classes at Clinton Computer. “dBASE II was real easy,” he said. “The
manual is in plain English. Even without all our records in the
computer now, it saves me and Julie probably five or six hours a
week. We were doing it manually before, and we’re on the verge of
saving other people in the company lots of time with the loan
processing by using dBASE II. I think we’d have to say with five
hundred houses in our backlog there is the potential for this to save
us $50,000 a year in carrying charges that may have accrued under
the old system of keeping loan-processing records.
“We are going to buy another machine,” Bowie said, “for the
Northern Division.”
The potential $50,000 annual savings from the two machines, by
the way, would include just reductions in carrying charges—not in
executive time or tasks besides loan processing. Consider the
economies that would result simply from less paperwork.
“When we first set up the computer,” Bowie said, “we set it up
exactly like we were doing things manually. As a division manager,
I’m in charge of marketing and production. And earlier we had (1)
marketing reports, (2) production reports, and (3) reports combining
highlights of each for me to determine whether to start houses and
things like that. But now all three categories appear on one loan-
processing form.”
dBASE II (or the new dBASE III) may not work for you. But for
Bowie it was a dream program through which he could store and
retrieve records quickly and conveniently for any one of many
purposes. He might set up his records mainly for loan processing.
But the “SALE:PERSN” field, combined with the “SALE:PRICE” one,
could tell him which outside sales reps were selling the most
expensive homes. In other words, the loan-processing data base
was one good way to keep track of the salesmen catering most
successfully to the $135,000 buyers. For who cared what Bowie
called his data base—“Loan Processing” or “Sales”? The point is, he
could follow the salesmen’s performance, too, through cross-
references between fields. dBASE II was a treasure trove of
information about trends, sales, or otherwise.
“The problem,” said Bowie, “is that dBASE II would work fine with
my budget summaries for my houses, except they require sixty fields
and dBASE II is limited to thirty-two. So Sue suggested the Multiplan
spreadsheet program. Multiplan is easy to use, even easier than
dBASE II. Julie got started with Multiplan with just fifteen minutes of
instruction.”
 Multiplan works on the same idea as the better-known VisiCalc
program, which, like WordStar, has sold hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of copies.
The true origins of these spreadsheets go back to 1978. A Harvard
MBA student disliked the tedium of using a calculator to tote up
columns and rows of interrelated numbers; it was boring even with a
pocket calculator. A change in just one number could throw off
dozens of other entries, so imagine the brain-numbing effect of
making an error and then having to recalculate an entire
spreadsheet. Why not write a computer program to alter all the
other variables if one changed?
And so was born the electronic spreadsheet; it and word
processing are the single most popular uses of microcomputers—the
real justifications for their existence. A VisiCalc-type spreadsheet can
add, subtract, multiply, average, do partial sums, find minimums,
maximums, simplify your life in a number of ways.
A description of VisiCalc in CPA Micro Report ticks off an awesome
number of applications: “sales forecasts, profit and loss statements,
rate-of-return calculations, project scheduling, tax calculation, pricing
strategies, financial planning, loan amortization, league standings
and report generation.” An electronic spreadsheet can help do your
checkbook; or it can assist in the preparation of a small country’s
budget—which, in fact, has happened.
Some even say that spreadsheets are contributing to the
paperwork deluging American business. VisiCalc coauthor Dan
Bricklin disagrees. “A lot of calculations,” he said of the pre-VisiCalc
days, “were being done on the backs of envelopes or corners of
envelopes or the corners of newspapers. VisiCalc isn’t causing
people to produce more numbers and reports. Those numbers were
always there, but they weren’t always being identified.”[28]
“Multiplan is incredible,” Bowie said of his VisiCalc-style software.
“I have generated budgets to see if they’ll do all I want them to, to
consider all the what ifs.
“And it’s a big help in scheduling production. We have a factory
producing cabinets for our homes, and our scheduling system is
critical, since at most it can produce cabinets for only fifteen units a
week.” The cabinet plant manager, caught between the demands of
Washington Homes’ northern and southern divisions, had scheduled
production according to his own whims.
“It was costing us a lot of money in missed settlements,” said
Bowie, “and cabinets were not delivered, or they were the wrong
color and size.” He was talking in late February, telling how, the
other day, he had loaded in thirty-five more cabinet orders and
instantly learned “we were out to April 15 on cabinet deliveries.
That’s the soonest we could get them based on the plant’s
production capabilities. I’m meeting with the manager this morning
to see if in the future he can up his output. I’ve found that
everybody’s got to live with lead times. Everybody’s got to give us
the right lead time on orders, which means we are now ordering
cabinets for delivery at the end of April and May, where we generally
in the past would not have ordered May delivery until April. If I miss
five house deliveries in a month because of cabinets not being there
on time, then that’s ,000 to $5,000 in carrying charges over the next
three to five months.”
Similarly, Multiplan was probably saving Bowie several thousand
dollars more over the same period by “identifying houses not started
because building permits have not been issued. And it will help
identify the reasons why they haven’t been.
“To get a building permit, all sorts of things must fall into place.
And now we can look at any particular job at any particular time,
and if we see it isn’t started, find out why the permit hasn’t been
issued.
“We can determine if we’re waiting for site plans or a plumbing
permit or electrical permit or whatever it happened to be and
instantly target and solve that problem.
“Before, the record keeping was ‘Go get a permit. Have you got it
yet?’ There were no details, no backup. We relied on our field people
to get the permits, and they would get the permits in a way that was
timely for them and their production schemes but not in a way that
was timely for us in bottom-line deliveries. So we are now able to
target all the permit process and make it happen at our rate.” Not
only was Bowie using Multiplan as a spreadsheet to plug in all the
what ifs; he was also using it as a data base, even if it wasn’t as
nimble in manipulating nonnumeric data as dBASE II could be.
Whatever chore Bowie was using Multiplan for, he loved the “Help”
screens. He could turn them on to guide himself through the
commands he wasn’t familiar with; besides, all of Multiplan’s basic
commands were normally at the bottom of the screen, anyway.
Multiplan, by the time you’re reading this, may not be the best
spreadsheet on the market, at least not for you. But at one point
CPA Micro Report was pronouncing it the “new Empress of
Spreadsheets” for accountants using a wide range of computers.
Multiplan even worked with VisiCalc files so that users of the older
program could easily convert.
“Multiplan,” said Micro Report, “... can sort a line-by-line record of
events by account number or name—a frequent requirement in CPA
applications.” Keepers of expense accounts, presumably, could
cherish such a capability. Also, Multiplan, as the newsletter pointed
out, lets you name your variables; you could refer more easily to the
cells or the exact locations in the columns and rows. Instead of
saying cells “A26” or “R38P,” you could refer to “Sales” and “Total
Costs.”
With programs like Multiplan, software designers are more
successfully catering to the needs of businesspeople who want
computers to adjust to them rather than the other way around.
That’s how it should be. Bowie is a construction executive, not a
computer expert, and Boland’s an accountant rather than a hacker.
Bowie, however, plainly seemed more willing to live with the
complexities of existing software. Many in his place would have used
a consultant—and wisely, I think, for Washington Homes was a
multimillion-dollar operation—yet Bowie had the background and
patience to computerize just with guidance from a store. He might
not have been a computer expert. But he loved the new. He loved
complexity if he could logically unravel it. He didn’t mind mistakes.
He felt in control because he had backups on disk and on paper. The
manuals didn’t scare him. Instead of soaking up every word there,
Bowie, like Seymour Rubinstein, had a gift for knowing which page
to flip to if he had trouble. Bowie was a born micro user. However
serious about his job, he might as well have been a child relaxing
after school with a few rounds of Pac-Man. He loved seeing instant
cause-and-effect relationships. He took as much delight in learning
where his division could be six months hence as a child might take in
winning an arcade game. He considered his computer “the greatest
therapy in the world,” an opportunity to “sit down and feel really
good” in “a fairly high tension business.”
Edward Boland, too, however, in a different, more structured way,
was curious about numbers and life, and in the end, I suspect, the
two men’s learning styles didn’t entirely explain their opinions of
their programs. Bolands’ general-ledger software just wasn’t right for
his needs. It straitjacketed him. Bowie’s programs, on the other
hand, helped him do just about anything he wanted.
“Anything,” incidentally, included advancing his career. When I
next caught up with him, in May 1984, he was president of another
construction firm and owned one-third of that company and was
taking home a paycheck thirty-five percent bigger. Bowie said his
computer skills “had a great deal to do with it. I had management
tools that not very many other people had.”
Alan Scharf: Integrated Program, Including Graphics
Alan Scharf, a forty-three-year-old New York executive, also has a
nice touch with software—a good-enough one, in fact, to have
helped win him a job at a blue-chip firm at triple his old salary.
“It’s done wonders for my earning power,” he said from his offices
at Merrill Lynch Leasing, Inc., where he was a $75,000-a-year
assistant vice-president. “I got this job because I walked in and told
them I could do a better job on an Apple.
“I didn’t own one at home at the time. But you can be sure that I
bought one promptly and boned up on it for the next three weeks,
and of course I’d done a lot of research on the Apple before then to
make sure I could deliver on my promise.
“My previous company had refused to let me get one to improve
operations there and do estate taxes. I had to do them by hand on a
calculator. It took hours per client. And I got mad. Most people my
age are afraid of computers, but I’d worked with word processors.
And what are word processors but another kind of computer?”
So Scharf left his job as an estate tax planner with a staid old
brokerage firm and set up shop at Merrill Lynch’s division dealing
with real estate and equipment leasing.
It was a VisiCalc devotee’s dream job, one calling for quick,
repetitive, accurate math in deals as big as $150 million. Merrill
Lynch Leasing made bids to companies hungry for better cash flow.
The leasing company (and rivals) offered to buy their headquarters
buildings or other real estate, freeing the money for bigger factories
or research and development. It was a series of leaseback
arrangements. Merrill Lynch organized syndicates for the ultimate
buyers—people or companies eager for tax shelters. And that meant
more than a little numbers crunching.
Imagine the variables. The deals had to be sexy enough to the
selling companies for Merrill Lynch to win the bids. At the same time,
the tax shelters couldn’t leak. The deals must provide the buyers
with the write-offs that the prospectuses from the leasing company
promised. Ideally, too, they would yield maximum tax advantages on
minimum investments. And for investments of different sizes and at
different tax rates, just what would the various benefits be?
When Scharf reported for work, he found that the real estate
department of the leasing company was on the verge of spending
$200,000 a year tapping into an outside firm’s computer to come up
with the right numbers. The big machine would have been able to
do simple debt-amortization calculations. Scharf could have told a
company, for instance, how long it would take to pay off a mortgage
on a building for which Merrill Lynch proposed a leaseback. But that
was only a small part of what the job needed. And what about the
costs?
So Scharf instead used an Apple system costing less than $7,000,
a one-time investment. The Apple couldn’t do all the calculations
needed, but it could actually outperform the time-sharing system in
some ways.
Consider simultaneous equations. The software on big machines—
at least by way of the terminals at Merrill Lynch Leasing—just didn’t
include them. But the Apple could simulate this capability. With the
VisiCalc spreadsheet it could juggle around dozens of interrelated
statistics, using nightmarishly elaborate algebra with Catch-22-like
mathematical spirals. In other words, you wanted to know the value
of x, and it depended on the value of y and z, and you couldn’t solve
for y until you solved z, and you couldn’t solve for z until you knew
x. That’s how it worked, except, quite possibly, Scharf and his staff
would be wrestling with, say, a through k instead of just x through z.
Struggling with these Catch-22s, the Apple was a slowpoke by
computer standards. It still took half an hour. That might seem like
the Indy 500 to someone accustomed to hand calculations. But
Scharf must have felt the same way I did about inferior word-
processing software. However faster than without a computer, it still
limited your possibilities. You didn’t have as much time to
experiment with all your choices. And the more time Scharf had, the
more closely he could consider all the variables and the more
attractive could be Merrill Lynch’s leaseback bids. The Apple did its
job. “We used it to compete successfully for work with a number of
well-known clients,” Scharf said. “Anheuser Busch—we did their
office building in St. Louis. We worked with Beneficial Corporation.
We’ve done a number of K mart stores.”
Scharf, never smug, still tinkered with the Apple and its software.
An observant computer dealer noticed he would keep asking for
larger RAM boards to allow him to do bigger, fancier spreadsheets.
And so it was that the dealer nominated Scharf a tester for Lotus
1-2-3 in late summer 1982. 1-2-3 was the new integrated
software from Lotus Development Corporation, a Massachusetts
firm started by a former rock disk jockey rich with $500,000 in
royalties from programs sold to the makers of VisiCalc.
1-2-3 combined a spreadsheet, graphics, and data base. You
could, for instance, pump figures from the spreadsheet program
directly into the data base with a few simple keystrokes. You didn’t
have to go through unwieldy computer rigamarole to transfer facts
from one kind of electronic file to another. More important, however,
Lotus, at least for Scharf’s use, was a more powerful numbers
cruncher than the VisiCalc he ran on his Apple. Lotus was for the 16-
bit IBM PC. Sixteen-bit machines were speed demons for numbers
crunchers, especially with powerful programs like 1-2-3. An Apple-
VisiCalc duo handled worksheets with 254 rows and about 65
columns. But an IBM and 1-2-3 duo could take on 2,048 rows and
256 columns.
Scharf’s first test version of 1-2-3 cracked simultaneous equations
in four minutes, one-tenth the time that the Apple-VisiCalc
combination took. Income and cash-flow statements came out
calculated to the nearest penny.

■ ■ ■

Alan Scharf’s Tips on Choosing the Right

Spreadsheet
Not every spreadsheet user has needs as complex as those of
Alan Scharf, a whiz with Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony, but here are
 traits he says you might look for:
1. A large number of rows and columns. A spreadsheet of 254 rows
and 65 columns doesn’t mean you can work with 254 rows and 65
columns containing a total of 16,510 cells. The actual number of
cells—the number of columns multiplied by rows—will be only
about a thousand. A 640K-RAM machine and an elaborate
spreadsheet would be much more appropriate for budget planners
in a large corporation with many products and divisions.
2. Speed. “Even with a simple spreadsheet,” says Scharf, “someone
might get annoyed if it seemed to drag.” In late 1984 his complex
calculations on an IBM PC were taking as much as four and one-
half minutes. And he said: “There are times when I just need the
answers faster.” The powerful IBM AT could run the present
version of Lotus 1-2-3 twice as fast. However, he was still looking
forward to the day when a version of Lotus 1-2-3 for the AT would
require even less time and address the full 3 megabytes of
memory (aided by a new operating system). Consult micro
magazines for the latest speed comparisons.
3. General simplicity and ease of use. In tricky places, does the
program offer “help” messages in plain English to guide you
through various procedures if you want? Ease of use will increase
as computer memories grow larger and leave more room for “help”
features.
4. Range of commands. Most spreadsheets nowadays let you easily
move or copy numbers. But there are less common but very useful
commands. Symphony, for instance, lets you flush out formulas
behind calculated cells so you can regain available memory space.
5. The ability to do what-if tables. The best spreadsheets won’t just
tell you what your profits would be if your costs increased by x
amount. They’ll also let you calculate for a whole range of numbers
around x, automatically creating a table.
6. Easy consolidation of figures from different spreadsheets. That’s
no small matter if you’re trying to come up with a profit and loss
statement for a twenty-division company. Lotus 1-2-3, unlike some
rivals, lets you consolidate an unlimited number of divisions.
7. Natural order of recalculation. Cells must influence the numbers
in other cells in a precise sequence if some calculations are to be
 accurate. Natural order of recalculation helps you automatically
control that sequence.
8. A useful macro language. Macros are combinations of
commands that you can program into your computer to reduce the
number of keystrokes and save time. A macro language
systematizes these shortcuts.

■ ■ ■

He could use 1-2-3 in the future, moreover, as a data base with up

to 32 fields and up to two thousand records, and it did allthe basic
search and sorting that you’d have in other data-base systems. At
the time I talked to him, the names and addresses of investors—
receiving quarterly income reports—were still stored on an Apple.
Scharf was waiting for the right word processor-mailer to come
along to work with the 1-2-3. Then the massive retyping job for the
address lists would be worthwhile. With space for two thousand
names, 1-2-3 would be much more useful than just a small filer. It
wouldn’t be just a primitive record-keeping system with limited
capacity.
Meanwhile, for Scharf, graphics was a snap. “If I send out a thirty-
page bid, I do three or four graphs with it,” Scharf said. “We have a
selling job to do with both the potential corporate leasees and the
potential inventors. The presentations are complex, and the graphics
come in very handy. We use line graphs and bar graphs showing the
expense of lease payments versus mortgage payments if they went
out and mortgaged the properties conventionally. The minimum
terms of the leases are usually twenty-five years; it’s a huge
numbers-crunching job, and we try to simplify everything as much
as we can. I come up with the figures on the spreadsheet part of 1-
2-3. Then I tell what I want on the graph. Maybe I want to make a
line for the rental income, interest expense, depreciation, or taxable
income. So I select the appropriate columns on the spreadsheet.
Then I push ‘V’ for ‘View,’ and I can see my work instantly as a
graph. If I don’t like it, I can quickly redo my calculations and look at
the graph again.
 “And 1-2-3 offers a tremendous range of printing options. You can
specify how many rows you want per page. You can tell if you want
border lines separating some numbers and titles of columns. You can
tell if you want a header—can indicate the subject on each page.
“The printout can be in any one of several type styles on dot-
matrix machines. Or you can use a daisy wheel with its own
typewriter-style print.
“And you can do color. A colleague uses plotters.” Controlled by
the IBMs and Lotus 1-2-3, ballpoint pens, with different colors,
wriggle up and down. They can make bars as well as line graphs,
and pies, too, among others.
Not that Lotus was the answer for everyone. Soft.letter, Jeffrey
Tarter’s trade publication, noted that all integrated programs
compromised in some way and were the software version of a Swiss
army knife. “Swiss army knives are nifty gadgets; we’ve got several
ourselves,” said Soft.letter, “but we don’t use them much. Instead,
we use specialized tools for specialized tasks—screw-drivers for
poking around inside the Apple, a stand-alone cork-screw for
uncorking the Chablis, and a nice big carbon steel blade for carving
roast beef. Each of these tools does its specific job better than the
multipurpose tool.”
At least in the version available as of this writing—listing for $495
—Lotus 1-2-3 didn’t have a real word processor. You could write
paragraphs. But it lacked the speed of true word processors and was
awkward. Nor did it offer communications software to use with a
modem. Context MBA, a rival integrated program, did. But then
MBA’s spreadsheet module wasn’t nearly as fierce a numbers
cruncher as 1-2-3’s was.
Lotus planned to improve 1-2-3’s text-processing ability—which it
did, ultimately, along with the data base, graphics, and spreadsheet
capabilities of a super-1-2-3 called Symphony. The new program,
unlike 1-2-3, also let you talk to other computers.
At Merrill Lynch Leasing, however, Scharf hadn’t any need to reach
a mainframe for his calculations. His four IBMs with 1-2-3 were
doing the work. They had cost $40,000, including extras like
printers; except for service, that was it. What’s more, with four
people, Scharf said, he was tackling the same work load that eight
people were handling in a similar office on the equipment-leasing
side of the operation.
Months later I reached Scharf to find out if his career was still in
ascent. “I’m now a vice-president,” he said. His salary had broken
the six-figure barrier, and he was hoping for a still more lucrative job
there or with another firm.
It was a good fit, Scharf and his software. He had the best
program for him. “Most people would rather talk about hardware,”
he said. “I know hardware, but I’d rather discuss software.” He had
a point. Especially now, when there are so many clones of various
IBM micros, you’ll find that good software will give you an edge on
your competition.
You can also gain an advantage by experimenting with new types
of programs. The next chapter discusses graphics, which, after many
years, is at last becoming practical for owners of inexpensive micros.

Backups:
◼ V, “3-D” Versus Mail-Order Software—and How to Shop, page 319.
◼ VI, “Easy” Data Bases: Another View (Mensa Member Versus
InfoStar), page 323.
7 Graphics (or How a Mouse Helped Joe Shelton’s
Friends Stop Feeling Like Rats)

When a California executive invited people to his apartment, they

often ended up feeling like rats in a laboratory maze.
“I had people driving around for half an hour and find a phone
and say, ‘Come on over and get me,’” says Joe Shelton.
In recent years, however, the “hit rate” for finding Joe’s place has
jumped from 50 percent to over 95, and computer graphics is the
reason.
Joe’s neat little map shows a mile-square area with up to five
turns before you even start wending your way through the complex
of 150 units. He isn’t an artist. But he uses a Macintosh computer.
With the Mac’s famous “mouse”—the pointer device that Joe rolls
along his desk to move the cursor—he can effortlessly make
sketches.
Granted, Joe isn’t detached about Mac’s virtues, not as a $50,000-
a-year software products manager with Apple Computer! And this
particular example is trivial. It’s also, however, irresistible. And the
story indeed shows how graphics can ease the life of a corporate
manager. People also use computer-drawn maps for, say, directing
colleagues to meetings in new places.
The easier-to-use graphics programs—like MacPaint—are to art
what word processing is to writing. They won’t turn you into Picasso.
But they’ll make your sketches and designs look less like your
kindergartner’s.
“But I can’t even draw a straight line,” you protest.
Well, Mac-style graphics programs will help you electronically pick
a line out. Or a circle. Or a rectangle. You also, of course, can
control the sizes and locations of the shapes you select. And you can
choose shading. And vary its intensity. And you can also use exotic
type styles and even design your own type.
By letting you zap mistakes, without messy erasures, computer
graphics may eventually halve the time it takes for you to do a
complicated drawing.
Directions: Turn onto Cary Avenue. Follow Cary around left and then right
bends for at least .3 mile from Washington St and turn into apartment
entrance on right. Make immediate left turn and continue until you cross
speed bump. Park in any uncovered space on left. Apartment 4 is upstairs in
the middle on the other side of the building.

Would you feel like rat in a maze if you had a map like
this to guide
you to Apple executive Joe Shelton’s house? Indeed