General Comments
The Tutorial Program
Excel has a very good series of tutorial programs which are excellent for
anyone wanting to learn Excel quickly. The programs go through the various
features of Excel step by step, explaining concepts, demonstrating actions and
then giving the user a chance to try it out. They are highly recommended for
all first time users of Excel, whether they have used another spreadsheet
before or not. One part of the tutorial is dedicated to Lotus 1-2-3 users.
The Programming Language
As mentioned earlier, Excel has a very powerful programming language which can
do anything from recording and playing back simple keystrokes to creating fully
fledged applications. The language is relatively easy to learn as it is based
on the popular BASIC. It is unfortunately unlike the languages used by other
spreadsheet packages because there has been no standardization of spreadsheet
macro languages.
Users who wish to learn the Excel Visual Basic are strongly recommended to invest in a third party book on the subject. Although the manuals are reasonable you will only be able to use the helpfile properly once you have cracked the way that the program works.
Transferring Data Between Other Spreadsheets
Many users will want Excel to read in data from their old spreadsheet programs,
or else they will want to save their Excel sheets in such a way that another
spreadsheet can use them.
Excel will read its own files (versions 2, 3 and 4) as well as Excel for Macintosh files. It will read all formats of Lotus 1-2-3 files (including version 3.1 3-D spreadsheets which are read into a Workbook), dBase III and IV files and text files in a variety of formats. The ability to read Lotus files means that Excel can read Works files.
Similarly, Excel will write spreadsheets in its own format (including versions 2 & 3), Lotus 1-2-3 (not version 4), Quattro Pro for DOS, dBase III or IV and text. However, depending on the format being written to various features may be lost. Thus text files will lose everything except the straight data, dBase files may lose some of the formula, and Lotus files may lose some of the fancier items, such as outlining, objects or macros.
The formats Excel cannot read or write to are Supercalc, Lotus 1-2-3 version 4 and Quattro Pro for Windows. Users of these programs are advised to save files in Lotus version 2 or 3 format from that program.
Using Excel with Other Programs
Excel can be used with a variety of other programs in a variety of ways.
Similarly many graphic packages will read Lotus files, so data can be imported into Cricket Graph or Uniras (on the Sun GPS system) and used for further graphic work. In the worst case Excel can export regular text files which every data analysis package of whatever sort should be able to import.
All of these options, except for Object, can be linked. This means that if you make any changes in the original spreadsheet, these changes are automatically reflected in the document where the table has been pasted. The particular options for pasting Excel tables may however depend on the software you are pasting the table into. Objects can also be edited, but this is done by double clicking on the Excel table where you have pasted it, whereupon Excel will be loaded and the table placed in it for editing. When you close Excel down again the altered table will be repasted in. This does not, however, affect the source data.
Copying and pasting charts is similar, but only the Object and the Picture options are available for pasting. Therefore the Picture is the only one that can be dynamically linked to the existing spreadsheet whereas the Object is edited in a similar manner to text objects described above.
