Product Reviews

It seems as though Quattro Pro is forever playing catch-up to Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3. With Quattro Pro 9, Corel hopes to change that by fixing compatibility and reliability issues while introducing some much-needed new features.

Size matters, and Quattro Pro notebooks can now be bigger, up to one million rows « 18,000 columns « 18,000 sheets. Previous size restrictions caused problems when converting large Excel workbooks. Other things like file sizes have got smaller, although the new efficient file format can't be read by previous versions. Quattro Pro 9 can manage previous qpw files, along with Microsoft Excel workbooks from Office 3 to Office 2000, and those of Lotus 1-2-3 (versions 1-5). It can even use the XLS or WK4 file format as its default. There are some features that can't be converted from one format to the other, but the QPW file format attempts to preserve any elements of XLS files that can't be converted.

Quattro Pro 9 has a new layout of menus and toolbars, although the old menus are still available, as indeed are those of Excel 97 or Lotus 1-2-3. The toolbars have the same flexibility as those in Office 2000, and can be arranged anywhere on the screen, while individual tools can be dragged on to any toolbar. Menu and keyboard assignments can be created in a similar way.

New workgroup features allow many users to edit the same workbook simultaneously with all revisions tracked. You can review, accept and reject the changes as you wish and there are also features that allow you to compare two notebooks to reveal trends or changes.

Corel's new RealTime preview facility in Quattro Pro allows you to see the effect of font and colour changes as you scroll through the possibilities. There's also a new Page break view that shows the extent of the printed page while you edit the notebook. The Go To feature has been enhanced and there's a new Browse feature, which you can use to highlight and navigate different parts of the notebook. It's also easier to spot formula cells - they're now flagged with a small blue triangle.

Quattro Pro has got smarter

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too. Typing the word Total next to a row or column will automatically create the correct formula to add up the row or column. Other commonly used functions can be found on the toolbar. There's a Formula composer that will lead you through the 600 or so functions that are available, some of which aren't available in 1-2-3 or Excel. The new euro currency symbol is supported alongside all other national currency symbols, as are Web queries that gather data from Web pages. Enhancements have been made to borders and fills, custom numeric formatting, speed formatting and importing data from text files.

Like Microsoft and Lotus, Corel sees the value of publishing Quattro Pro notebooks as HTML or XML documents - a facility that has improved substantially since version 8. Unfortunately, it's still a long way behind Excel 2000's almost seamless performance. The HTML files produced now contain some formatting but they don't look much like the notebook they came from. You can't publish directly to Web folders and there's no way of incorporating interactive features into the published notebooks. You can also forget about dragging and dropping Web data from Internet Explorer into a notebook. Opening an HTML document that was produced by Quattro Pro seems to further mangle its appearance, so keeping data in HTML format and editing it repeatedly with Quattro Pro doesn't appear to be possible.

With Quattro Pro 9 the old, clunky PerfectScript macro language has been joined by VBA, newly licensed from Microsoft. Sadly, the usefulness has been compromised. You can't record VBA macros and the object model of Quattro Pro is very poor, with just three objects: Application, Document and PerfectScript. Almost all interaction with Quattro Pro must be carried out by calling methods of the PerfectScript object. There's basic help available but it's not integrated into the VBA Object Browser or the VBA Editor. Pressing F1 when typing PerfectScript methods in VBA will produce a 'Keyword not found' error. But, the inclusion of VBA in Quattro Pro will extend the possibilities for using the product.

However, the mapping component seems to be stuck in the 1970s, with defunct counties like Salop and Avon included, and Shropshire, Rutland and the newly restored Welsh counties excluded. Some old bugs have returned to haunt Corel, including the problem in the fill down routines from version eight. In fact it's got worse. Fill a series from 2 to -2 in steps of 0.1 and you get -1.77635683940025E-15 where you should see zero.

Quattro Pro 9 has improved, and with further changes it could give Excel and 1-2-3 a run for their money. But, it's still following the pack rather than leading it.