Applix for Alpha musings ... (A mini-mini review of sorts, and a request for tips)

[Charles E Taylor IV <charlet hubcap clemson edu>]

I purchased and installed Applix for Alpha ($99, direct from Applix) onto my
AS200 4/233 (80M RAM, Redhat 5.1 plus fixes with 2.0.35 kernel recompiled for
sound support) last week, hoping I could use it for some of my data workups. 
Seeing as it's really the only "complete" office package out there for
Linux/Alpha, my choices were somewhat limited.  My experiences:

* Installation was easy.  Mount CD, cd to it, and run the install script. 
There was only one hitch - the question about the customer number.  I didn't
see this in the instructions, and the screen says it's "on the box".  Good
thing I had the box handy (I almost threw it out!) - apparently the number's on
the inside box flap on a sticker.  The same number was on my invoice from
Applix, so I assume that's the number.

* The release notes could use some work.  Alpha is printed on the first page,
but most of the stuff inside was for intel.  The instructions for installation
appeared to be incorrect, at least with regards to the name of the install
script.  Some things scared me, like the warning about running in anything
other than 8-bit mode.  Frankly, if it wouldn't run in 24-bit color, I'd have
sent it back.  I'm not quitting everything and restarting X to load an office
package that should know how to run on a modern display!  Luckily, it appears
to run fine in 24-bit mode.

* I like the penguin. :)

* The thick manual (Make It Happen), while very basic was nice to have around -
had more info than the Office 95 manual I got did.  Online help was also
useful.

* The only one of the components I've used for any length of time so far is the
spreadsheet - which was effectively what I bought the package for in the first
place.  I notice that the window refreshing is still somewhat buggy with
gridlines turned on - the gridlines don't stay in the spreadsheet - they wander
into the toolbars and persist where they shouldn't.  I noticed this in the
Intel version (4.37 - haven't decided whether to upgrade at home) too.  I
suspect this might be an X server-related problem (S3 Virge DX or VX using the
S3V server), though.  I may see if it persists with my Trio card, though it can
only do 16-bit color at 1024x768.

Excel 97 import is dodgy at best.  On my test file, basically a copy of one of
my typical data spreadsheets, it took a *long* time to import the file - on the
order of 5+ minutes of waiting before I could do anything with it.  This sheet
had five "plain data" worksheets (no calculations), a calculation sheet, and
two chart sheets.  The charts were scatterplots with lines but no markers,
composed of five series with approximately 1000 data points each.

The charts, unfortunately, were mangled beyond recognition.  The axes were
incorrect, the titles were all drawn on top of each other, and the data itself
was plotted incorrectly.  Redraw of these charts was also painfully slow.

I deleted these charts by deleting their sheets (also an unusually slow
process) and saved the numerical data and calculations as an Applix native
sheet to eveluate the charting capabilities of the spreadsheet (again, this is
what I purchased Applix for - data manipulation and charting).

I set the chart preferences to "XY" and data sorted in columns before
beginning, using the spreadsheet preferences menu.  I then proceeded to hilight
the data to plot (6 columns of about a thousand cells each, first column was X
values).  As I normally do in Excel, the first row contained labels for each
column of data.

I used the "Step by Step" tool to graph the data as lines without
markers.  Or rather, I *attempted* to graph the data.  After selecting the type
of plot (XY, lines without markers) I was presented with a partially rendered
Step 4 of 5 box and the error message (not verbatim - I'm not at my Alpha at
the moment) "Can't plot more than 700 points in a pie chart".  Clicking OK
returned me to the range selection step (Step 1).  This is odd, because at no
time did I select a pie chart!  (Bug in Spreadsheet program, I assume).  I
noticed that in the partially rendered "Step 4" box, the incorrect options were
selected (data in rows was selected and "first row for legend text" was
unselected) instead of the options I'd made my defaults previously.  I
wasn't able to change these, as I couldn't click on the options due to the
error box being up, and closing the error box immediately returned me to
Step 1.  After repeated attempts to change chart type and get the data to plot
(and some foul language), I found out that I could plot the data if I didn't
select the row of labels.  Whew.  My first plot using this newfound knowledge,
unfortunately, was made using the lines with markers chart type.  Big mistake. 
When trying to enter the chart labels in Step 4, Applix would take sometimes 45
seconds (!!!) to redraw the preview plot if I stopped typing labels for a few
seconds.  *Extremely* frustrating.

Changing to lines without markers made the above more bearable, but it was
still slower than it "should" be.  I'm not used to waiting 10 seconds before
being able to enter the Y axis title. :)  Luckily, saving templates does work
(after a 1 minute load/draw by the Graphics module), so I don't have to go
through step-by-step often.

Another questionable behavior: When entering titles for the legend, if you
enter anything resembling a cell reference, it takes it as such - with
unpredictable results.  I entered "LS20000" as a label and Applix took that as
a cell reference, and filled its line in the legend with garbage characters. 
The cell reference was my goof-up, but Applix shouldn't have put garbage
characters in my chart.

Now a question - has anyone else noticed Applix's sluggishness?  I know, I'm
not using it on a 600 MHz machine and I'm using fairly beefy datasets, but the
machine I'm comparing this performance to is a Dell P90 with 16 megs RAM
running Windows 95 with Office 97.  The Dell doesn't choke nearly as bad with
the chart wizard or simply displaying the charts as my Alphastation with the
same data sets.  Is there anything I can do about it, or do I have to live with
my Alpha being stomped by a rickety old Dell with less than a fourth the
memory? :)

I plan to upgrade the memory of my AS200 to 96 megs, but I doubt this'll speed
up Applix much...

---
--------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: Charles E Taylor IV <charlet@hubcap.clemson.edu>
                            <charlet@innova.net>
Date: 07-Jun-99
Time: 19:32:19
--------------------------------------------------------
Visit me on the web!
http://orangesherbert.ces.clemson.edu
--------------------------------------------------------