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.
[Illustration:
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 you would. Lest
anyone mistake Joe for Customer Support, the map doesn’t contain
his actual address.
]
Of course there’ll always be resistance to graphics from some hard-core
bureaucrats in and out of government.
“The Macintosh,” gripes one, “takes us back to the time people were
drawing pictures on cave walls.”
He’ll tolerate _some_ graphics but loves to read and write twenty-page
memos.
And if I were an executive, I myself would growl if my people insisted
on Macs just so they could use Old English characters for routine
paperwork. In fact, for that, I’d rather work with a Kaypro or a
mouseless IBM PC.
“For the world of letters and numbers a computer without a mouse would
be better,” says James Fallows, the _Atlantic Monthly_’s Washington
editor, who tried a Mac for several weeks but happily returned to a
machine with WordStar. He and I are baffled. We can’t understand the
Mac’s lack of cursor keys. Why couldn’t Apple have kindly let Mac users
move the cursor conventionally on the screen if they wanted? Omitting
the cursor keys was IBM-style arrogance, no ifs or buts. Even if cursor
keys become available on a numbers pad, it won’t be the same as having
them in a convenient location on the main keyboard.
But graphics? That’s where the Mac and similar machines may pay off for
people with overscheduled art departments or an honest willingness to
experiment:
● A California designer can draw a hot-water system for an outdoor car
wash in just four hours, thanks to his Mac; once it took him days.
● A Washington state man uses his Macintosh to design optimal orchard
layouts.
● Another user lays out the Yellow Pages with his Macintosh, while still
another employs one to plan paintings.[29]
Footnote 29:
The car wash, orchard, Yellow Pages, and painting examples come from
_USA Today_, May 3, 1984.
Advertising agencies, especially, may benefit from computer graphics
even if the Mac-priced technology still has some flaws. Take one
example. Just after a Colorado agency bought a Mac, a bank wanted an ad
saying that it gave personal service—that its customers were more than
computer numbers. But how to get the idea on paper?
“I suggested that the bank use a computer for the ad,” said Rebecca
Glesener, assistant art director of Heisley Design and Advertising, a
twenty-five-person agency in Colorado Springs. The bank agreed.
Using a Macintosh, a Heisley artist drew a man and woman with masses of
numbers on their faces.
“If your bank sees you this way,” the ad said, “come see us.”
Western National Banks loved the results. And when I talked to Glesener,
her agency was about to unleash another Mac-drawn ad—the machine’s
“self-portrait”—for an Apple dealer.
“We have several clients in the computer business,” Glesener said, “and
we thought we should be aware of computers.”
Of course you don’t start instantly doing first-class graphics work on
Mac-like machines. Take the man drawing the Western ad. He had “no
computer skills” in his background, and he toyed around with the Mac for
some six hours or so before he did the numbers heads for the bank.
With the art stashed away on computer disks, though, the Heisley agency
could more easily crank out different versions of the same drawing.
It’s like word processing. Once you’ve stored your material on your
computer disk, you needn’t start over from step one.
Mac-like machines may also streamline ad agencies’ mock-up work. Through
the marvels of graphics an art director can more easily figure out the
best location for Brooke Shields’s derriere in a jeans layout.
In fact, the Heisley people said they had used Mac successfully on
drafts of a sales brochure and an ad for the U.S. Amateur Hockey
Association.
Even so, Don Pierce, the artist behind the bank ad, warns: “Inexpensive
machines like the Mac can’t come up with drawings good enough for final
ads without a deliberate computer effect. A line other than a
forty-five-degree line can be pretty ragged because the machine makes
them in steps.” And they lack a good-enough resolution to downplay the
roughness.
Eventually, of course—through high-quality graphics made on laser
printers—cheap machines may turn out slick ads that don’t scream, “A
computer made me!”
Meanwhile, Mac-like computers will do fine for drafts and nonpublished
work. Already, when hooked up right to some Compugraphic typesetting
machinery, Mac’s sister computer Lisa II can turn out seamless charts
for publication.
Who else might use computer graphics? Some examples:
A SALES REP (OR BROCHURE DESIGNER)
Computer graphics would help you simplify a complicated brochure in
which twenty statistics proved the superiority of your company’s
industrial dishwasher to Brand X’s.
There’s no question—graphics can liven up otherwise dull data, and
remember: if people don’t read, there’s less chance they’ll _buy_. In
that sense, sales literature isn’t so different from a newspaper. Again,
though, bear in mind that the inexpensive computers may not produce
graphics of professional smoothness.
A CORPORATE TRAINING OFFICIAL OR TEACHER
You can Xerox your Mac-drawn pictures of a widget maker or Mayan
artifacts—perhaps even include them in test papers. And you or your
audiovisual specialist can even prepare overhead slides by photocopying
the drawings onto clear plastic sheets.
A BUREAUCRAT
The same slide technique could be a relief to bureaucrats preparing low-
or mid-level briefing.
A PERSONNEL OR DIVISION MANAGER
What a boon to the addicted drafters of personnel charts!
Now, there’s a dark side to this. I have a good friend at the Department
of Housing and Urban Development named Al Ripskis.[30] “They’re
_reorganizing_ again,” he groans from time to time. It’s a waste of good
tax money in Al’s opinion. The faces and desks change; the bungling
remains.
Footnote 30:
Ripskis is not the hard-core bureaucrat I mentioned earlier in the
chapter. He in fact puts out an underground newsletter regularly
exposing his agency.
Shelton, though, says the better companies thrive on fluidity, and in
Silicon Valley he may be right. It depends on your outfit’s style of
management. Don’t play computer games with your people, however, just
because the machines make it easier to play musical chairs.
AN ARCHITECT
Microcomputer graphics might be just the ticket for rough sketches. In
fact, on a sophisticated machine, the computer graphics would do for the
final version.
Who knows? An architect someday might carry around a little computer the
size of a sketch pad and do designs to be fed into a larger machine for
the detail work.
A PRODUCT DESIGNER
If I were one, I’d leap at the chance to try computer-aided graphics.
Sooner or later, American industry will make widespread use of machines
that automatically turn drawings into real frying pans, soap bars, or
refrigerator cabinets. Well, it won’t be _that_ simple. But computer
graphics and related technologies will increasingly blur the line
between creative types and production people.
Just look at the newspaper industry. Reporters, after all, on most daily
papers are basically setting the type for their stories as they tap them
out.
But back to the factory. The jargon is =computer-aided
design/computer-aided manufacturing= or =CAD/CAM=.
A FACILITIES MANAGER
Working on the floor layout for offices that your company will rent?
Computer graphics could be just right in this era of instant partitions.
A CONVENTION PLANNER
What better way to juggle around the positions of various booths on your
charts?
A CORPORATE PLANNER
(AND MANY OTHER EXECUTIVES)
Building nuclear submarines, you might worry about your keel before your
propeller shaft. An overgeneralization, maybe. But that’s how a defense
contractor hit on the need for =Project Evaluation Review Techniques=
(=PERT=) software.
Charlie Bowie—the home construction executive in the last chapter who
worried about his basements before his floors—might have used a
PERT-style program with graphics to keep up with his priorities.
“With PERT programs,” says Shelton, “you can graphically draw important
relationships: ‘This has to be done before this starts.’ Or, ‘Both of
these have to be done before the other thing starts.’ Or, ‘This can wait
while the others are done.’”
A more complex PERT can help you juggle priorities of two hundred or so
projects. “It’s a capability magnifier,” admits even my friend the
hard-core bureaucrat. “PERT charting by hand takes ten times as long as
a computer. You can wear holes in the paper—erasing mistakes—if you do
it by hand.”
Hearing of PERT, I recalled the Case of The Missing Cafeteria. The
taxpayers were supposed to get a cafeteria—worth maybe $500,000 or
more—at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in
Washington, D.C. The landlord’s company, however, laid not one brick for
the cafeteria. Some say it was politics—he was once a friend of Spiro
Agnew’s. The landlord denies anything wrong. Whatever happened, the case
boggles the mind. How could an entire cafeteria slip through the cracks;
how could the General Services Administration, the government’s real
estate agent, have shoved aside such an important detail even in a
$60-million-plus lease? You never know. Perhaps with PERT graphics in
the right federal offices in the 1970s, some budget-minded lunchers
today wouldn’t feel forced to brown bag it.
“When you have so many little pieces,” says my friend the Hard-Core
Bureaucrat, working at another agency, “it’s so easy to let one drop off
the table. We could sure use a good word processor-cum-PERT machine.”
Although computers can help you tidy up your work, they themselves can
be messy enough unless you know what you’re doing. There’s no substitute
for a good computer expert in many cases. And training, too. In the
following chapter, you’ll have one answer to “people” problems—the
“Who-How Solution.”
Backup:
◼ VII, Graphics Tips, page 331.
8 ❑ People: the Who-How Solution
Stewart Research, Inc.—a fictitious name, along with the others in this
tale, which is true in the main elements—once seemed on the verge of big
money.
Frank Stewart, a slim, intense young chain-smoker, was receiving
hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large company to monitor
congressmen and bureaucrats influencing certain business activities. He
planned to sum up gigantic piles of newspaper stories inside a computer.
Then his early-warning service would ferret out patterns for his
benefactor and other businessmen trying to keep up with the vagaries of
government. Stewart’s plan may come to pass, but last I knew, he was
fighting off unfounded rumors of bankruptcy.
“We’ve wasted upwards of $40,000 on computer consultants and the
consequences of their ‘advice,’” Stewart told me in the modest
white-frame home where he and his wife lived and worked and took in
boarders.
“And that doesn’t include the thousands of dollars in business we lost
because our computer was down at the wrong times.
“I had to lay off five people largely because of the consultants’ lack
of interest in anything but turning a buck off us.”
Stewart’s story illustrates the need for the Who-How Solution in hiring
consultants. Who-How may also help micro users train employees and get
the most out of their data-processing departments.
Who-How is nothing more than the five Ws and the H of newspaperdom. Like
a reporter, you simply ask, “Who?” “What?” “Why?” “When?” “Where?” and
“How?” and especially “How much?” Ask those questions often. Ask them
when:
1. Deciding whether to hire a computer consultant. How much in your time
and your people’s will it cost _not_ to have one?
2. Hiring and using a consultant. It isn’t just a matter of asking,
“Who?” Ask, too, “Who cares?” Who cares about a consultant’s two
decades with IBM? What counts is how much he can do for _you_. Is the
IBM experience relevant?
3. Training employees. Don’t clutter your people’s minds with
computerese not related to their jobs. Use the five Ws and the H to
strip the training to the basics—which, by the way, almost surely
won’t include BASIC.
4. Working with your company’s data-processing people. Know which
questions to ask to find out the computer crew’s true attitudes about
micros. And come up with the right answers of your own if the
mainframers feel threatened by your interest in do-it-yourself
computing. Good data-processing people, however, won’t be
frightened—quite the reverse.
The scary aspect of Frank Stewart’s consultant fiascoes is that he and
his people were hardly lost amid high tech.
“Some of us were inventors,” Stewart said, and his vice-president, Bob
Hillard, even had a smattering of the FORTRAN programming language.
Stewart’s firm didn’t rush blindly into computerization. Originally, it
had been hand culling articles from 140 periodicals and 16 major daily
newspapers. “We sat down,” Hillard recalled, “and worked out a
mathematical formula to give weight to a particular article by mention
of certain words, certain individuals, certain companies.” Existing data
bases like The Source and Dialog just wouldn’t do. You couldn’t easily
use them to search out the political patterns affecting the fortunes of
Stewart’s clients.
Stewart spent $31,000 on a computer and soon was suffering defective
circuits and junky software. He paid a secretary to cram almost a
million words of newspaper articles into the machine’s hard-disk memory,
but it still couldn’t fetch facts as easily as he’d hoped. Then the
data-base program, the one he was using to store facts and juggle them
around, crashed—apparently overwhelmed by the volume of data. Micro data
bases at the time, the early 1980s, couldn’t easily handle big hunks of
text. Stewart couldn’t retrieve whole articles.