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From: rich@documail.UUCP (Rich McCallister)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: Need Recommendation for Gold Disk Home Office application
Summary: Experience with Home Office
Keywords: spreadsheet word-processing desk-top publishing
Message-ID: <306@documail.UUCP>
Date: 8 Mar 91 16:19:59 GMT
References: <1991Feb25.215417.25572@cbnewsk.att.com>
Organization: Bell & Howell DocuMail Division, Evanston, Ill.
Lines: 46

In article <1991Feb25.215417.25572@cbnewsk.att.com>, cbnewsk.att.com!paulb
(Paul Bidwell) says:
> The Home Office program (from Gold Disk), which contains several applications
> bundled together, looks interesting (and got a good review in AC).
> Does anyone have this program? or heard anything about it?

    I bought Home Office about 1 month ago. My main purpose for buying it was
to use the AREXX interface for the spread sheet. I'd read the Amazing Computing
review, which said it was a very complete interface. I wanted to write a
talking interface that would hook up to it via AREXX, so that my wife, who is
blind, would be able to use the spreadsheet.
    I was disappointed to find that the AREXX interface was pretty much limited
to setting or reading the formulas/values of the cells. Many normal spreadsheet
functions, such as "insert column" or "load spreadsheet from a file", just can't
be done from AREXX. Maybe I was spoiled by the excellent AREXX interface that
Cygnus ED has.
    So, that pretty much put the kabosh on using it for my original purpose.
Worse than that (much worse for the average user) was the fact that the
spreadsheet, when given a formula such as "=a1+a2", would do the calculation
and display the result, but would print "Unknown Function in formula" or some
such nonesense when you wanted to look at or edit the formula. That made
using the spreadsheet very inconvenient, to say the least. (AREXX also
returned the same message in a string when it asked what the formula in
such a cell was.)
    Calling up Gold Disk, their friendly user support guy said they knew
about the problem, and had a fix for it. He took my name & address, and I
received the update altho I hadn't sent in my registration card yet. (It
was about 3 weeks before I got the update.)  He said they hadn't heard of
a bug I found: giving a negative parameter to the YEAR function (e.g.,
"=YEAR(-12)") makes the program hang or crash. (This bug impressed me, as
it was only the second function in Calc that I tried.) I also told him I 
was very disappointed in the AREXX interface.
    'Page', the DTP-like program, seemed difficult for me to work with
compared to PageStream 2.0. I must confess that I haven't read most of
the documentation for 'Page', which may explain a lot of the difficulty.
It did provide a few fonts that you can use in your FONTS: directory,
which was kind of interesting.
    'File', the database program, seemed to be very basic; not a lot
of bells and whistles.
    The lack of some fancy features, plus the fact that others occasionally
did strange things, makes me think of the package as being hard to use,
a little buggy, and surely not slick (for 1991).
    I had no spreadsheet (other than a talking one that I wrote for my
wife), and the 'File' is better than the database stuff in AmigaVision, so
I decided to keep the package. For the price, it is OK; it is not the best
available, tho.