A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[The Grabber]

My 2 Cents on Lotus vs. Excel........(with apologies to Bob Gammon).

FWIW:

I 'grew up' on Lotus from the old DOS version (pre-WYSIWYG). This was all at my employer (in the 1980's). Over the years, I wrote hundreds (if not thousands) of Spreadsheets and Keystroke Macros and was quite adept at it. Once I bought a PC for home, I paid something like $500 for the first version of Lotus Smartsuite for Windows 3.1 (like back in the early 90's). I stayed current through all those years upgrading 3 times ($$$), right through and including Smartsuite Millenium Edition 2 years ago.

Over that time, I changed employers twice. 7 years ago, at this employ, I had to learn MS Office (including Excel). It was tough, but I made the transition (albeit kicking and screaming). Since I use Excel at work so much, I am exposed to it more than Lotus 123 at home, and gradually have learned to appreciate Excel more. With the latest versions, there is just no comaprison anymore. And believe me, I'm no fan of Microsoft overall, so that was hard to say! In a recent issue of PC Magazine, they trashed Lotus' Smartsuite versus MS Office in almost every metric, so I'm not alone in that opinion.

Bottom line is that ever since IBM bought Lotus years ago, they have not kept up with the integrated applications as well as MS. Too bad really. They owned the business back then and threw it away along with WARP OS

I bought 2 new WIN XP PC's last Fall. Since my son 'grew up' on Office in elementary school, he convinced me to make the switch. We now have Office XP installed on each of the new PC's (I still have the old PC with Lotus).

As for graphing, I think there are some pretty neat add-ins available for graphing via Excel, but I'm not familiar with any of them. I do miss the 'data labels' function from Lotus, but there are ways to do it in Excel I think. Now I have a new quest!

I was actually duplicating the now famous RFH Spreadsheet this morning at home, and expect to add a few features. I'll make it available to whomever via email it once it's done.

ps to Rob: Do you use the IRR function to do the annualized return? If not, how are you calcing it?

Regards, Steve