[Cube] Needed: OS X Digital "Graph Paper" Program

[George Pepper]

I'm glad Excel works for you.  It's evidently a very popular program with business people judging by it's ubiquitous presence on virtually every PC on the planet.  However, it sure stinks if all you want to do is draw a graph in an intuitive manner by grabbing a virtual writing instrument and dragging it across the template.

The reason I get disgusted with some software vendors, not just MS but they are the worst hands down, is that software engineers have been working with graphical user interfaces for what, twenty years now? And I have personally gone from a Timex-Sinclair, to a Commodore 64, to a TI 99-4A, to a Synclavier Digital Music System (It used a VT-100 with a 640K graphics card), to a 486DX-33, to an old PowerBook and Newton 130 combo, to the Cube/Xserve/TiBook/iBook/iPod/Airport network I have now.  I was willing to read three phonebook-sized manuals back in the Synclavier days in order to learn how to use that system, but by now there should not be a single slip of paper with any software except the registration card as far as I'm concerned.  Memory has gone from 64K to over 1GB but do we have useful and interactive help menus with all this "fat-ware" we run today?  Nope. How hard could it be to simply have the Help button give a text box that starts out "How do I..." and fill in "draw a graph" and have it explain the process?  Surely if the software is so all powerful it ought to have a useful help function versus just showing you a table of contents.  Some help menus even have to connect you to a website to work!!!  I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous for a program that takes up an entire CD-ROM or even a DVD-ROM!

Last bash at MS:  I'm a guitarist so sometimes I download ASCII TAB's of transcriptions off the internet to add peices to my performance set (I'm a solo guitarist and perform at least two nights per week, sometimes up to five).  I could not for the life of me figure out how to keep Word from distorting those into a non-ASCII format.  Interestingly, if I paste them into TextEdit they don't get distorted; they remain in the ASCII format.  So, from the practical standpoint of MY PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE, the cheesy little TextEdit program is INFINITELY superior to Word simply because it behaves logically and what you paste into it is exactly what you get back.

And, IMVHO, a graph program that allowed you to set boxes per inch and worked as intuitively as Paint would go over very well, judging by the fact that there seem to be a TON of graphing programs but none of them will allow you to simply draw your own versus entering a formula or some such nonesense.

Pep

On Friday, June 17, 2005, at 06:20PM, atoa <atoa at krak.net> wrote:

>I'm sorry, but Excel does work exactly as I described. It does not, never 
>did, and one hopes, never will, act like Mac Paint.
>
>It is a spreadsheet program. It was not designed to print graph paper with 
>marks on it, but it does do it pretty well if you take the time to figure 
>out how to use it, rather than just rail about it.
>
>Hate Microsoft all you want, but Excel is an excellent program, and has 
>been since I started using it (in the form of Multiplan) on my 128k Mac.