Lotus 1-2-3 "Knock-Off" Thrives Decades Later

A company named Borland developed Turbo Pascal, a programming language, in 1983. It was my favorite application for writing small DOS-based utility programs. Then Borland created a Lotus 1-2-3 clone called Quattro. In fact. it worked far better than Lotus 1-2-3, so naturally Lotus sued. Borland had copied the menu structure of Lotus 1-2-3, but the underlying program was new.

Just as WordPerfect was pushed aside by Microsoft Word, so were other spreadsheet programs losers in the marketplace to Excel. Although Excel has largely buttoned up the spreadsheet market, the current version of Quattro Pro remains in Corel's WordPerfect Office Suite.

Novell acquired Quattro, Paradox, and WordPerfect but wasn't able to market any of them successfully. Eventually, all of these applications came to be owned by the Corel Corporation in Ottawa. They form the basis of the WordPerfect Office Suite.

Prologue: End; Future: Begin

"What’s past is prologue" William Shakespeare in The Tempest. So let's fast-forward to today's Quattro Pro.

In case you've ever wondered about the name, "quattro" is the Italian word for 4 and Borland's implication was that Quattro was one better than Lotus 1-2-3.

Generally speaking, Quattro Pro will open Excel spreadsheets with ease, but there are exceptions. I have a large and complex Excel workbook with nearly a dozen individual Worksheets, all of which are full of formulas that modify data within individual sheets and across multiple sheets. Attempting to load this workbook into Quattro Pro caused the application to crash immediately. That's considerably better than Apache Open Office Calc, which appeared to be loading the sheet, but then crashed after churning for 15 minutes.

Those who must deal with large and complex documents, whether from Word or Excel, will almost certainly be better served by working with Word or Excel. That said, few Word or Excel documents can be characterized as large and complex. Quattro Pro is more than capable of handling most spreadsheets created by Excel.

One thing that might be a bit surprising when you open Quattro Pro is the number of sheets that are present by default. Most spreadsheet programs open 3 sheets by default and I always modify the default to just a single sheet. One is all I need most of the time and it bugs me a bit to see 2 unused sheets. Quattro Pro opens an entire alphabet of sheets by default (26 sheets from A to Z) but I find that this doesn't bother me. If you need more than 26 sheets, you can add them -- all the way to ZZZ. If I did that math right, that would be 17,576 sheets (26*26*26).

Quattro Pro also provides project templates that can be used in place of blank sheets. These templates provide a basic format and structure for common types of work and data entry forms. Users can also create their own forms.

Users who have switched from Excel can make the transition easier by enabling the Microsoft Excel workspace simulator. When this function is turned on, Quattro Pro features such as toolbars and menus items are rearranged to simulate their locations in Excel. Regardless of whether users enable the Excel simulator, Quattro Pro makes it possible to save spreadsheets in Excel format.

Quattro Pro can open files from Excel as early as version 3 all the way through the 2013 version. This includes XLSX files and macro-enabled XLSM files, but it's important to note that what you see on screen may differ somewhat from the Excel view. When saving files in Microsoft format, users are limited to XLS versions, not any of the XML-structured versions.

Quattro Pro includes all the formula functions and tools you'll need to create standard spreadsheets for budgets, invoices, and the like. The function library addresses the needs of specialized users, too, such as engineering, finance, and statistics. Like the other parts of WordPerfect Office X7, Quattro Pro doesn't have a ribbon interface. For some people that will be a negative, while it will be a welcome feature for others.

This is a personal budget template.

Behind the personal budget template, you'll find the macros that do all the heavy lifting. All you need to do is fill in the numbers.

If you want to save money without relying on Open Office or Libre Office, the WordPerfect suite is a good choice. And, if you need to accept documents from users of other applications, the WordPerfect suite generally does an excellent job of importing those files.

Microsoft could make the process of importing its files by other programs easier and more straightforward by releasing information about the XML file formats. Don't expect that to happen anytime soon.

Quattro Pro will do everything you need to do and more.

As with many applications, Quattro Pro has far more features that most users will ever need or learn about. Today's programs are so feature rich that the usual response to questions about whether something is possible will be Yes unless you ask it to do something absurd such as squeeze lemons for lemon aid or corral the cows and bring them in for milking.
Additional details are available on the Corel WordPerfect website.

Everything New is Old Again

If you're old enough, you may remember when cell phones had dial tones and when they were the size of an attaché case. For many years, smaller was better. Phones became so small that the buttons were nearly unusable. Now they're growing again and bigger seems better. Don't look for any phone the size of an attaché case again, though, and don't expect a dial tone.

We have entered the age of the phablet, part phone and part tablet. Imagine holding a paperback book up to your ear. Samsung is leading the way with phablets such as the Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge.

The Edge is curved and has two touch screens.

The original Note is the phone that was responsible for the term "phablet" because it's a phone but it's nearly as large as one of the smaller tablet devices. Apple is likely to join the fray next week, which will give Samsung the opportunity to accuse Apple of copying its design.

Screen resolution for the Note 4 has been improved but the screen remains the same size. The camera has also been upgraded to a 16Mpxl device and the phone includes image stabilization to reduce blur caused by camera motion. The camera that faces the user has been increased to nearly 4Mpxl to allow for better selfies.

The Note Edge is, as someone on the Monty Python comedy show might have said, something completely different. The phone's case curves toward the back of the device and the curved the edge has its own touch screen. Why? Consider it a place for your favorite apps to live. Consider it a notification bar. Consider it a news ticker. It can serve all those purposes.

Expect the Edge to be even more expensive than the basic Note. Samsung hasn't revealed prices, but it refers to the Edge as the premium device and we all know what that means, don't we?.

Short Circuits

Now It's Home Depot's Turn

It looks like Home Depot is the latest retail operation to lose customers' credit card information to hackers. The investigation is continuing, but the evidence seems to point to the home improvement retailer.

You might wonder how investigators figure these things out. It's actually simpler than you might think. The process involves identifying a group of credit cards that have been compromised and then trying to find common locations where the cards were used. The latest batch of victims seem to have Home Depot in common and the stores stretch across the country from one coast to another.

Hackers sell the stolen credit card information online. Investigators buy a certain number of accounts so that they can track the information.

Security expert Brian Krebs, who has frequently been the first person to report security breaches, says that the thieves have developed better methods and can now provide the card holder's postal code along with the card number and PIN. Card information that is sold with the postal code commands a higher price because the people who use the stolen card information can use the card to make purchases in the owner's home area -- thus short-circuiting bank anti-fraud measures that flag transactions made far from home.

Krebs says that most of the cards tested were in the same postal code as a Home Depot. That could make the problem far worse than the breach at Target stores because Home Depot has more than 5 times as many locations as Target. Even worse, the crooks may have been siphoning off data for more than 4 months.

Home Depot says that it became aware of the problem only this week and is investigating. The company hasn't yet confirmed any information.

Free Applications - A Follow-Up

Last week, I offered two cautions when downloading free applications. Both of them were apparent in responses I received from readers. The two applications called out explicitly were Gimpshop and CPU-Z. Let's take a look at the possible problems.

First, though, here's my warning from last week:

When you're searching for a free application, there are two cautions to keep in mind:

1. A Google search for a free application will probably return an advertised link at the top of the list. Sometimes the advertised links are OK and sometimes they're not. I always avoid them if the software developer has a site because some of the advertised sites will attempt to install malware or will load additional applications along with the free application that you're looking for. Sometimes the site will warn you about the additional applications, but most will not. So if you're looking for "A Free App", you'll want to find the link to "afreeapp.com" and not the one for "afreeapp.malware.com" or "malware.com/afreeapp/".
2. Some developers, because donations aren't providing enough income, agree to install extra apps with their programs. There's nothing wrong with this as long as the installer program explicitly calls out the additional application or browser helper object that will be installed. In many cases, this information is obscured or entirely hidden unless you choose "custom" installation. Always choose the custom-installation option so that you can see exactly what's being installed.

Gimpshop

Between the time I wrote about Gimpshop and the time the article ran, Gimpshop had changed from a simple installation to one that could include extra "features". This triggers a warning form Avast and probably from other antimalware applications. The Gimpshop website clearly explains how to avoid installing any of the extras. If you follow the instructions, only Gimpshop will be installed.

I don't support or agree with decisions by developers to take this route, but I understand that the developers may consider this to be the only viable option when people who use their applications refuse to support them in any way.

CPU-Z

I've heard that Norton claims that the CPU-Z application is malware. It didn't trigger any warnings from Avast.

As best I can determine, there is no reason to believe that any of the applications from CPUID contain malware. Still, the previous 2 warnings apply: If you feel that any application you're considering might contain malware, the prudent decision would be not to download or install the application regardless of who recommended it to you.

NetGear Network Attached Storage Update

After 72 days, the problem of a NetGear router being unable to recognize a USB3 drive larger than 1TB on its USB3 port has been resolved. Neither Seagate nor NetGear looks very good in this story, but at least NetGear's technicians had the persistence to continue working on the problem long after Seagate blew it off.

The Seagate technician simply dismissed the problem by telling me that Seagate external drives were not intended to work with routers. At NetGear, they knew that the drive should work with the router. The issue progressed from level-1 tech support through levels 2 and 3, then finally to engineering. New firmware for the router partially solved the problem in that the drive was recognized on the USB2 port.

After some additional investigation, a technician at NetGear asked me to try a different USB3 cable. That seemed an unlikely fix because certainly Seagate wouldn't ship their drives with substandard cables. Still, when I bought a new USB3 cable and used it to connect the drive to the USB3 port on the router, the drive was immediately recognized.

So that's 2 black eyes for Seagate.

Fraud in Your Mailbox

This isn't an account of online fraud. It might not be fraud at all, but it's certainly something that calls for caution. This week I received what looked like a check for $69,750. I shredded it and threw it away.

If you've received one of these, consider an article in Inc Magazine before doing anything with it.

In part, the article says "A merchant cash advance -- also known as credit and receivables financing -- is essentially the business equivalent of a payday loan. A business owner is advanced a cash sum -- usually less than $150,000, often within a week and without the amount of paperwork required by banks. The merchant agrees to pay back the principal plus a fee, which is typically at least 25 percent of the total amount advanced but sometimes much more. The MCA provider collects the money by taking a portion of the business's credit card sales until the debt is paid."

As for whether this can be considered "fraud", the article's authors concluded that it couldn't be. Writers Elizabeth S. Bennett and Nitasha Tiku spoke with Paul Martaus, president of Martaus & Associates, a research and consulting firm. The article quotes Martaus: "As the industry has grown, so has the controversy surrounding it. 'The word unscrupulous comes up a lot in the business,' Martaus says. Some providers advance as much money as possible, regardless of their customers' capacity for debt. Some have even changed their billing practices without notifying business owners."

Governments used to have laws against interest rates as high as those quoted here. If you need money desperately, you might get a better deal from the mob.

Nude Celebrity Pix Push Apple Stock Lower

You have no idea how much fun it was to write that headline. You also have no idea how confused I am by that headline. But I do have this clue for celebrities (and for those who aren't celebrities): If you think that you would be embarrassed by having nude pictures of yourself posted to an Internet site, you should avoid storing such photos in locations where others might find them.

Maybe that's blaming the victim, but I don't think so. But why did it cause Apple's stock prices to drop 3% this week?

Maybe the drop was partially the result of Samsung's announcement about its new phones, but part of the drop is the result of concerns about the security of Apple's online storage.

The photos were stolen from ICloud, apparently because celebrities aren't bright enough to create strong passwords.

Apple says that its systems weren't responsible for the breach.

Check Out this Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) from Magix

Until this week, I hadn't heard of the Sequoia Digital Audio Workstation, but the fact that version 13 has been released may suggest that I've not been paying attention. Magix says that it's intended for use in production, broadcast, and mastering. It sells for €2500 (that's about $3300). You're probably already on the phone to place your order.

This clearly is a system that's designed for use in a broadcast setting because it works with various broadcast content management systems.

Sequoia 13 has a beautiful user interface and specifications to match the magnificent price tag. Because it includes video import and export functions as well as video capture, this is an application that's not limited to audio.