Look up values in a DOS spreadsheet
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- čas přidán 4. 05. 2024
- It's the start of May - and if you're a university student, that means the end of the semester. I teach a few university classes, and I use a spreadsheet to calculate final grades. Here's how I turn your score into a letter grade using LibreOffice Calc (or Microsoft Excel) versus Quattro Pro and As Easy As on DOS. #LOOKUP #VLOOKUP #VTABLE
As Easy As was shareware during the 1990s, but TRIUS Inc (the publisher) released it for free via their forums. You can find it here:
www.triusinc.com/forums/viewto...
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Standard comment rules apply. - Věda a technologie
In college, I got a student job tutoring Lotus 123, dBase IV, and WordPerfect, mostly for continuing ed students. This definitely brings back some memories.
Those DOS applications were pretty cool! 😎
I'd forgotten how competent DOS-era Spreadsheets were!
They really can do a lot! And I love that you can use a DOS spreadsheet like AsEasyAs without a mouse. It's amazing that my fingers still "remember" all the keyboard shortcuts after 30 years. I use modern spreadsheets too (like Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc .. and I teach a university class that uses Microsoft Excel) but I'm way more productive with a DOS spreadsheet because I can do it all from the keyboard. Only a few things are easier with the mouse, like formatting and Autofill.
The more I watch these old software videos, the more I realise we’ve evolved backwards in terms of ergonomics. Appart from Web Browsers, there are very few software that indeed benefit from graphical user interface and fancy windows. Now with ChatGPT, you can ask any questions from the terminal. For non-video or gaming use, there’s almost no benefits of launching a whole GUI. We should bring back these perfectly fine software and port them on modern OS. Like they did for WordPerfect on Linux.
I really do love the old DOS programs like AsEasyAs. It's still my most favorite spreadsheet… on any platform. If I don't need to share a spreadsheet with someone else, I'm equally likely to do it in AsEasyAs these days.
And while I didn't use it at the time, Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5 is actually really good. I like that the keybindings like ctrl-c and ctrl-v and ctrl-x are there, so my fingers don't have to "remember" a new set of word processor keys. I guess I've been trained off WordPerfect because I use LibreOffice and Google Docs so much now, but Word for DOS 5.5 does the job just fine.
Best of all: both AsEasyAs and Word for DOS 5.5 are free (gratis)! Microsoft posted Word for DOS 5.5 on their "Downloads" site several years ago (you can find the link on Wikipedia's "History of Microsoft Word" page in the references) and TRIUS Inc posted the activation code for the last version of AsEasyAs for DOS (and a version for Windows, but I only used the DOS version). You can find the link on TRIUS's forums.
This is really great, that you showed the same process in various spreadsheet apps, no matter the process is basically the same. 👍
I'm glad you liked it! It's really cool that spreadsheets just haven't changed much over time. More formatting features, and a few new functions - but basically the same.
Nice tutorial! One thing I'd like to note: since modern spreadsheets are operated most of the time by selecting cells and ranges with mouse, but the older ones use some different keyboard combinations (you need to also press some key before typing-in the formula or any text), I am wondering if you could perhaps use some software which displays all your keystrokes (any held and pressed keys)? Perhaps some always-on-top window overlay.
Good point! I use OBS to record these videos on Linux, and I think there's a plug-in I can use for OBS.
My college used the three Buttonware programs for business courses, PC-Type, PC-Calc, and PC-File (database), because they were integrated with each other and cheaper than MS Worse. They weren't the most powerful, but they worked, and PC-Type had a feature that I didn't see in any windoze program for more than 30 years: block copy and paste of text, windoze could only do full lines.
Huh, I guess you don't need 3000 MHz and 32,000 MB of RAM to run some grading spreadsheets! 🤔😉
Yeah, funny that. DOS spreadsheets are still pretty powerful, even compared to modern stuff. At least for the stuff I do, AsEasyAs could do almost everything-if I didn't need to share a spreadsheet with someone else.
youre super good at teaching
Thanks, glad you think so! 👍
Thanks, good old days of text based applications. FoxPro was the king of database apps
You can do a lot with these text based user interfaces. 80×25 did a lot of heavy lifting. And the great thing is that you don't have to use a mouse for most of these DOS apps-and my wrists prefer that I not use a mouse if I can avoid it.
@@freedosproject Yes, exactly. Using more keyboard instead mouse is always my choice. Thanks for your efforts.
I think As-Easy-As is great, better than the big box DOS programs like 1-2-3 and QPro, it's still very useful.
Definitely still useful! And what's great is that TRIUS Inc released it for free. It was shareware in the 1990s, but they eventually posted the activation code for the last DOS veresion via their forums. You can find it there, and use As Easy As on FreeDOS for free. It's my favorite spreadsheet!
Things didn't change a lot😎
Nice video as usual.
Thanks Jim!
Yeah, it's really surprising how little has changed in spreadsheets. I didn't use @VTABLE at the time, but I've been using it more recently as I explore all the cool stuff you can do in these DOS spreadsheets. I really like it.
@@freedosproject I didn't know how lookup function works before this video,
I thought it finds the exact match which caused some troubles in the past, I really find it interesting how it finds the nearest value.
One learn a new thing every day
Thanks Jim!
Love your videos, man!
I've been playing around with my new 200LX recently and I was wondering whether there was any particular reason you've never made a video about Lotus?
I've done some videos on Lotus 1-2-3, and some on Quattro Pro. But I mostly use As Easy As for two reasons:
1. It is my absolute favorite spreadsheet. I like it better than modern spreadsheets, too. It saw me through my undergrad physics program, and because I used it so much I know it really well. So it's my go-to spreadsheet.
2. It's available for free, direct from TRIUS. It's not open source, but they made the last DOS version available to anyone. But Lotus and Quattro are not available like that, technically the only way to run those is to find "abandonware" and I try not to do too much of that on the channel.
that's pretty good !
Glad you think so! After all these years, I'm impressed by how "modern" these DOS spreadsheets can be. I think As Easy As can handle almost all of my everyday spreadsheet needs-especially if I don't need to share a spreadsheet with someone else.
Do you have a template to calculate an average execution time of a program from 10 runs ignoring best and worst values?
This sounds *exactly* like the first lab I did as an undergraduate physics student! It was basically a demonstration of "measurements can have errors/deviation" and "how to analyze data." We had to use an electronic scale to measure the mass of 100 pennies (in groups of 10) and find the average mass and std deviation … excluding the top and bottom values in each group. And we had to use a caliper to measure the diameter of a 1-foot rubber hose in 100 positions (in groups of 10) and find the average diameter and std deviation … excluding top and bottom values in each group. Things like that.
The lab instructor intended for us to enter the data into a FORTRAN77 program running on the campus VAX system and calculate the mean (average) and std deviation - but it was *much* easier to put that into a spreadsheet and do the repetitive analysis there.
So let's say you have 10 data points in A1 through A10. Sort that range (either by "increasing" or "decreasing" value, doesn't matter). To sort a range in As Easy As: /DS then D to select A1..A10 for the Data range, then P to select column A for the Primary sort column, then G for "Go."
With your data sorted, you can do a calculation that only uses data in A2 to A9, which will be the 8 data points that exclude the top and bottom values. Enter a function A12 that's @AVG(A2..A9) and now you have the average ("mean") that excludes the top and bottom values. You can also add a calculation in A13 that's @STD(A2..A9) to tell you the *standard deviation* of the range, excluding the top and bottom values.
@@freedosproject Perfect.
Quattro Pro, WordPerfect, Paradox. how I miss text apps that don't require terahertz processors with petabytes of ram...
I really love those old DOS programs. Especially spreadsheets - they haven't changed much in 30 years. As Easy As is still my favorite DOS spreadsheet. I think As Easy As can handle 99%+ of my regular spreadsheet work, especially if I don't need to share my spreadsheets with anyone else.
Microsoft also released MS Word 5.5 for DOS as free (gratis) software some years ago, you can find the link on Wikipedia's "History of Microsoft Word" Page in the references. While I didn't use it at the time, Word 5.5 for DOS is pretty good. The key bindings feel very natural and "modern," like ctrl-c to copy, ctrl-v to paste, etc. (Looking at Wikipedia, Word 5.5 for DOS was a pretty big visual overhaul, so I don't know if the key bindings changed when they did 5.5 or if these key bindings were the same in earlier versions.)