🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <gYYS-qy00XcL029HQm@andrew.cmu.edu> jb28+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jeffrey Joseph Barbose) writes:
>I have not used Wingz, but I have heard that it is a pig (big, slow).

I have.  It is.  At least, IMHO, it is.
It offers good recacls which are important to me - I use number-crunching
spreadsheet layouts which take 2 to 5 minutes in Excel.
However, I still use the big E.  WingZ has too many rough edges for my liking.

Without getting too nitpicking, I would site
  1) scroll bars automatically covering max size - very silly, and abandoned
     by Excel many upgrades ago
  2) that silly button which appears when scrolling - a gimmic if ever I did
     see one, especially given point 1, which means you cannot use it usefully
  3) most seriously, given all the hype, I dont find WingZ graphing terribly
     useful.  I tend to work with a b&w laserwriter, so I want good b&w graphs.
     I find the screen appearance of b&w graphs very bad indeed at default
     settings, so it takes too much effort to see what I want to look at

Etc, etc.  The issue of E v WZ has been hacked out before.

>I have had extensive use with Excel and have just ordered the upgrade to
>2.2.  From the upgrade sheet, 2.2 seems to have added most of what I
>would have liked to see in Excel.  Graphics is a big deal for what I do
>(medical research), so I use cricketGraph, cutting and pasting between
>Excel and cGraph.  (this is the kind of thing that first made the Mac an
>'innovative' machine).  Moving data between, either by
>clipboard/scrapbook, or by saving the Excel files to text or SYLK, and
>opening w/cGraph is mostly painless.
>
>Jeff

I do similar things from E to DataDesk.  You just have to watch MultiFinder,
but that is not really surprising.  I reckon, in agreement with Jeff, that
Excel does the job.

I dont like Microsoft, and I dont like their products, but I must admit that
I USE Excel.  It does the job, and like a great car, I have to know its
weaknesses as well as its strengths.  At this stage, I feel I know when
and why I will cause it to crash or be generally slow and irritating.
With this knowledge, I find WingZ does not match up.  It has good features,
and it beats Excel without question in SOME areas, but to my mind that does
not justify its use.

Mike.

Mike Lloyd, Dept of Statistics, |"Does anyone understand what is happening? ..
Trinity College, Dublin,        |  They tell me this is living -
Ireland.                        |   They tell me this is LIFE!"
(mlloyd@maths.tcd.ie)           | - Michael Been, of "The Call"