At work we're only up to Lotus Notes 6.5, so I haven't had the, er,
pleasure of using Notes Spreadsheets. So I didn't know what to expect.
I downloaded and installed the new Lotus Symphony to try out its
spreadsheet. Yuck!
The main reason I'm disappointed is that it's too much like
OpenOffice.org Calc. I should have expected that since there's lots of
articles on the web stating that it's based on OOo Calc, but I was
really, really hoping there would have been some 123-like features/
functionality. While it does add MDSUM and MDCOUNT functions which
maybe should work similar to 123's @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
and @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
using criteria
expressions and multiple tables, I couldn't figure out how to join
multiple tables, and the online help for these functions is extremely
skimpy.
But I could have lived with that. What really sucks is the UI. The
menu differs from OOo Calc's, Excel's, 123R9.x's, and FTHOI Google
Spreadsheet's. The Windows menu contains only a single command - to
display thumbnail images. Maybe IBM meant that as a rough equivalent
to 123R3's (discontinued) / W W P command. It does provide a means of
switching between different open Symphony files, but it's VERY SLOW
and VERY ***BERSOME compared to **STANDARD** Window menus, like, say,
the Window menu in Lotus Notes 6.5. An extremely stupid design.
Then there's the keyboard. Unlike IBM's apparent decision to ignore
OOo Calc's menu and provide their own idiosyncratic one, they're
perfectly happy to retain OOo Calc's screwed up keyboard mapping.
Note: I'm biased about the keyboard mapping - key mappings that were
standard in 123, the original Symphony spreadsheet, VP-Planner,
Quattro Pro and Excel are de facto standards. That OOo Calc doesn't
provide the same mappings is simply proof that none of the OOo Calc
developers ever used a different spreadsheet and likely don't really
give a flying @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
what spreadsheet users might expect in that regard.
Yes, [F1] does launch online help, and [F2] switches to Edit mode. But
cycling through relative-absolute sheet/column/row combinations used
[****ft]+[F4] rather than [F4]. And [Ctrl]+[F6] does nothing. The only
way to move between different workbooks (Symphony files, actually) is
using the thumbnails through the Window menu.
Maybe if someone could show an example of MDSUM working against
multiple tables I could see some point to Symphony. Until then, it
sure looks like a monumentally unnecessary, completely pointless fork
of OpenOffice.org Calc. But, golly, they use OASIS ODF file formats!
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