Lotus 1-2-3 is the Apple II of software, and it’s about time that Lotus faced the fact. Lotus’s future is in the technologies developed by its in-house coders of Improv, the dynamic and fresh model for the new century’s. Shop from the world’s largest selection and best deals for Microsoft Windows 3.x Computer Software. Shop with confidence on eBay! Enter your search keyword. Advanced: eBay Deals. Problems with Modern Spreadsheet Developments 'Enhancements' of spreadsheets over the last few years have not involved substantive improvements in functionality, but have primarily just involved enhancing their. The Best of NeXT Computers. Lotus Improv was the dynamic spreadsheet that allowed you view and analyze data in new ways never before possible. 1-2-3 import/export 'Improv knocked me out. Learn and talk about Lotus Improv, Lotus Software software, Spreadsheet software. Lotus Improv is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Development released in 1. For Windows 8.1, 7, Vista & XP. Nuova inserzione Lotus Improv dynamic spreadsheet for Windows UK English version 2.1. Nuova inserzione 2 used blank archived AUDIO CASSETTE tapes. Lotus 1-2-3 Release 5 for Windows list $495 (US), $129 (US) upgrade. This enables multiple. Media Rack for Windows 3.1 2.20.0.23. Lotus Improv is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Development released in 1991 for the NeXTSTEP platform and. Lotus 1-2-3 shipped 60,000 copies in the. Lotus Improv for Windows v2.0 (there was no 1.0). Lotus Improv was a spreadsheet program from Lotus Development released in 1991 for the NeXTSTEP platform and then for Windows 3.1 in 1993. Development was put on hiatus in 1994 after slow sales on the Windows platform, and. Ne. XTSTEP platform and then for Windows 3. Development was put on hiatus in 1. Windows platform, and officially ended in April 1. Lotus was purchased by IBM. Improv was an attempt to redefine the way a spreadsheet program should work, to make it easier to build new spreadsheets and to modify existing ones. Conventional spreadsheets used on- screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses. Although not a commercial success in comparison to mainstream products like Lotus 1- 2- 3 or Microsoft Excel, Improv found a strong following in certain niche markets, notably financial modeling. It was very influential within these special markets, and spawned a number of clones on different platforms, notably Lighthouse Design's Quantrix, which has since been spun off into its own company. Apple Inc.'s Numbers combines a formula and naming system similar to Improv's, but running within a conventional spreadsheet. History. Users would enter data into rectangular areas on the sheets, known as cells, then apply formulas to the data to produce output values that were written down in other cells. A Berkeley professor, Richard Mattessich, was a proponent of using spreadsheets for financial modeling and . In 1. 96. 4 he proposed using a computer to run all of the calculations from the point of the change on, thereby updating the sheet in seconds, rather than days. Teaching the use of spreadsheet modelling was common in business schools, often using chalkboards marked up with a layout similar to the paper versions. Using a chalkboard made it easier to fix errors, and allowed the sheet to be shared with a class. In 1. 97. 9 Daniel Bricklin was using such a device when he decided to attempt to computerize it on the newly introduced personal computers. Joined by Bob Frankston, the two created the first spreadsheet, Visi. Calc, and released it on the Apple II computer in 1. When Ben Rosen of Morgan Stanley saw the program, he wrote that . One of these was written by a former Visi. Calc programmer, Mitch Kapor. His version, Lotus 1- 2- 3, would go on to be an even greater success than Visi. Calc, in no small part due to the fact that it ran on, and was tuned for, the new IBM PC. Lotus 1- 2- 3 shipped 6. Lotus was soon one of the largest software companies in the world. Lotus set up an advanced technology group in 1. One of their initial tasks was to see if they could simplify the task of setting up a spreadsheet. Completed spreadsheets were easy to use, but many users found it difficult to imagine what the sheet needed to look like in order to get started creating it. Should data be entered down columns, or across rows? Should intermediate values be stored within the sheet, or on a separate one? How much room will we need? Pito Salas, a developer at ATG, decided to attack this problem. Yet in every case, the existing spreadsheet programs required the user to type all of these items into the same (typically single) sheet's cells. This overlap of functionality led to considerable confusion, because it's not obvious which cells hold what sort of data. Is this cell an input value that is used elsewhere? Is it an intermediate value used for a calculation? Perhaps it is an output value from a calculation? There's no way to know. This insight led to ideas for a new spreadsheet that would cleanly separate these concepts — data, formulas, and output views that would combine data and formulas in a format suitable for the end user. At the same time, the new product would allow users to group data . This meant that moving the data on the sheet would have no effect on calculation. Salas also noted that it was the views of output data that was often the weakest part of existing spreadsheets. Since the input, calculations and output were all mixed on a sheet, changing the layout could lead to serious problems if data moved. With the data and formulas separated, this was no longer an issue. Salas demonstrated that this separation meant that a number of common tasks that required lengthy calculations on existing spreadsheets could be handled almost for free simply by changing the view. For instance, if a spreadsheet contained a list of monthly sales, it was not uncommon to have an output column that summed up the sales by month. But if one wanted that summed by year, this would normally require another formula column and a different output sheet. Back Bay. In February 1. Glenn Edelson to implement a working version in C++. As they worked on the project, it became clear that the basic concept was a good one, and was especially useful for financial modeling. At the end of the spring, they hired Bonnie Sullivan to write up a project specification, and Jeff Anderholm was hired to examine the market for a new program aimed at the financials industry. That summer, the team took Modeler to a number of financials companies, and found an overwhelmingly positive reception. A year later, in September 1. Modeler. After examining a number of platforms, including DOS and the Macintosh OS, the team decided the target platform would be OS/2, at that time considered to be an up- and- coming system in the commercial space. The project was given the code name . When he saw Back Bay he immediately got excited and started pressing for it to be developed on the Ne. XT platform. The Lotus team was equally excited about Ne. XT, but continued work on the OS/2 platform. This proved to be much more difficult than imagined; at the time, OS/2 was very buggy, and their Presentation Manager UI was in its infancy. Development was not proceeding well. After struggling with OS/2 for months, in February 1. Ne. XT. When Jobs learned of the decision he sent an enormous bouquet of flowers to the team. More importantly, he also sent Bruce Blumberg, one of Ne. XT's software experts, to teach the Lotus team about Ne. XTSTEP. One worrying problem turned out to be an enormous advantage in practice; as the back- end was written in C++ and the front- end in Objective- C, it turned out to be very easy to segregate the program and track down bugs. Additionally, Ne. XT's Interface Builder let the team experiment with different UIs at a rate that was not possible on other platforms, and the system evolved rapidly during this period. Returning for a visit in April 1. Jobs took the team to task about their categorization system. He demanded a way to directly manipulate the categories and data on- screen, rather than using menus or separate windows. This led to one of Improv's most noted features, the category . Jobs remained a supporter throughout, and constantly drove the team to improve the product in many ways. Blumberg remained on- call to help with technical issues, which became serious as Ne. XT was in the process of releasing Ne. XTSTEP 2. 0, the first major update to the system. Ne. XT release. The program was an immediate hit, receiving praise and excellent reviews from major computer publications. This gave Ne. XT a foothold in this market that lasted into the late 1. Apple Inc. The APIs and programming language for Ne. XTSTEP were so different from Windows and Macintoshsystem software that porting was very difficult. Lotus Improv for Windows v. May 1. 99. 3, running on Windows 3. Like the Ne. XT release, the Windows version also garnered critical praise. In March 1. 99. 4, Lotus decided to attack this problem by re- positioning Improv as an add- in for 1- 2- 3, although the programs had nothing in common other than Improv's ability to read data in 1- 2- 3 files. Sales on the Ne. XT platform could be explained by Ne. XTs limited marketshare, but the failure on the PC was another issue. Among the favored explanations are the fact that, unlike the release on Ne. XT, the Windows version faced strong internal resistance from 1- 2- 3, and corporate immune response became an issue. Lotus' sales and marketing teams, well versed in selling 1- 2- 3, did not know how to sell Improv into the market, so they simply didn't, selling the well known and understood 1- 2- 3. Other explanations include the fact that Microsoft Excel was being offered as part of the Office bundle at marginal rates that were tiny in comparison, as well as several mis- steps during introduction, like the lack of a macro language or undo. Joel Spolsky blames it on the design itself, claiming it was too perfectly aimed at a specific market and lacked the generality that Excel featured. Notable among these was Lighthouse Design's Quantrix, an almost direct clone aimed at the financial market. Quantrix almost suffered the same fate as Improv when the company was purchased by Sun Microsystems and (eventually) turned into a developer of Java applications. Quantrix was instead spun off, and continues to be sold as Quantrix Modeler. The spreadsheet itself would contain only input data. Instead of referring to the data as, in effect, . Formulas were typed into a separate section, and referred to data through their range, not their physical position in the sheets. Views of the data, some which looked like spreadsheets, others like charts, could be created dynamically and were not limited in number. To illustrate the difference between Improv and other systems, consider the simple task of calculating the total sales for a product, given unit sales per month and unit prices. In a conventional spreadsheet the unit price would be typed into one set of cells, say the . The user would then type a formula into . Then that formula must be copied into all of the cells in column C, making sure to change the reference to A1 to a new reference for A2, etc.
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