Microsoft Ships Excel for OS/2 Presentation Manager
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
NEW YORK (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- Microsoft yesterday
released a new version of its Excel spreadsheet program that runs
under OS/2 with the Presentation Manager graphical user
interface. Excel thus becomes the first spreadsheet available for
Microsoft's OS/2-PM, beating to market such competitors as Lotus
(1-2-3/G) and Informix (WingZ).
 
In features and capabilities, the new Excel is almost a direct
copy of the current Windows product, version 2.1, and is very
similar to Excel for the Macintosh. All versions use the same
macro language and file structure.
 
In fact, the new Presentation Manager version is differentiated
from its ancestors less by features than by the underlying
capabilities of the operating system. OS/2 supports large memory
addressing, virtual memory, multitasking, and Dynamic Data
Exchange (DDE) between applications; Excel can use all these
features, as well as the long filenames and fast disk access
inherent in the High Performance File System of OS/2 1.2.
 
Unlike Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3, Excel OS/2-PM doesn't permit
"three-dimensional" spreadsheets with multiple pages. Instead,
Excel offers a "data consolidation" feature that lets users link
up to 256 spreadsheets, which can reside in memory, on disk, or
across a network. (With OS/2's virtual memory capability, the
amount of memory is limited only by available disk space.)
 
Excel can also share data with other PM applications through DDE.
At the product announcement today, Microsoft demonstrated Excel
working with Q+E, an add-in that permits direct access from Excel
into SQL databases, to retrieve and manipulate data from IBM's
OS/2 Extended Edition Data Manager. Later, Microsoft accessed a
DB2 database using Intuition Dataview from Tesseract. Other
OS/2-PM applications with which Excel can swap data include the new
Aldus PageMaker 3.0, Borland SideKick 2.0, Polaris Packrat, SPSS
(statistics), and DeScribe (a word processor).
 
Excel doesn't itself use OS/2's multitasking capability. (As
before, it supports recalculation in the background, but this is
accomplished within a single thread, according to company
chairman Bill Gates.) Through OS/2, however, Excel can execute at
the same time as other functions; for example, a user could
format a disk while recalculating a spreadsheet.
 
Excel for OS/2-PM is shipping now and will list for $495, the
same price as the Windows version. Current Windows users can
upgrade for $50, Microsoft said. The program requires a 286- or
386-based PC with 2.5M bytes of RAM and OS/2 1.1 or later.
 
Contact: Microsoft, 16011 NE 36th Way, Box 97017, Redmond, WA
98073-9717; (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.
 
                              --- Andy Reinhardt
 
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