Software of the Month Club 1996 May/Software of the Month Club 1996 May.iso/mac/ISO9660/OS2/MESA/README.INF

OS/2 Help File | 1995-10-23 | 12.1 KB | 227 lines | [TEXT/hscd]

ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 1. Mesa for OS/2 v2.0.4 Readme ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Mesa for OS/2 v2.0.4 for OS/2

Thank you for using Mesa for OS/2.

Mesa for OS/2 v2.0.4 is our third update of Mesa for OS/2 and is available free
to all registered Mesa 2 users. It includes several new features as well as a
number of bug fixes and general improvements.

Here is a quick summary of the improvements in this version:

Usability Enhancements

     Keyboard typeahead has been restored, (since the ill-fated Mesa 2.0.3)
     Improved Keyboard Handling, including Shift-Arrow keys to select ranges,
      and End-arrow keys to move quickly around a workbook layer
     Ability to Find & Replace or Replace All entries in a workbook
     Page Tabs displayed at the bottom of a workbook, and can be hidden
     Ability to SmartSize(TM) Rows and Columns
     Substantial redraw performace improvements
     Recalculation and graph-redraw are performed as background processes

 Feature Enhancements

     Print Preview
     Formula Builder
     In-cell Editing
     Script Recorder and Additional MScript commands
     Text Box Graphics

 File Format Enhancements

     Lotus 1-2-3 WK4 Import and Export capability
     Quattro for Windows WB1 Import capability
     Improved ASCII Import capability

 For a complete description of product changes, please look at the on-line
 documentation under the heading "What's new in Mesa 2.0.4". The on-line
 documentation is available through the Mesa Online Documentation INF file,
 which should have automatically been installed in your Mesa 2 folder, as well
 as through the Mesa help system.

 The background redrawing of graphs is new to Mesa 2.0.4.  Changes that require
 a graph to be redrawn will put up a grey box where the graph will eventually
 appear.  Mesa will draw the graph to an off-screen buffer, in the background,
 and when the graph is ready it will be updated on-screen automatically.  You
 can use the application, change graph settings, or data, etc. without waiting
 for the graph to be redrawn.

 The INF and help files have been revised to reflect the new functionality
 within Mesa - for example, the new keyboard commands have been documented in
 several places in the on-line help. Please be aware that the documentation for
 these features supercedes what is written in the Mesa User's Guide. We are
 working on a revised User's Guide, but the overhead costs and turnaround time
 associated with printing bound documents are prohibitive for interim updates.

 There are new example files available with Mesa 2.0.4. These are completely
 different from the ones that shipped with 2.0.2.  Those files are still
 available; in particular, a REXX scripting example can be found in
 EXAMPLES\ACCOUNT.M2.

 Listed below are some known problems with the most current revision of Mesa.
 As always, producing and maintaining software is a process of continuing
 growth and learning through experience. Our goal is to continually improve our
 product in response to customer feedback; your comments (both positive and
 negative) are much-needed cooperation in that goal.  In addition, we expect to
 be making our bug-list available to the public via our ftp site.  Send us mail
 at [e-mail], or look at ftp.athena.com in the near future.

 0. Installing over previous revisions gives a SYS2070 error at run-time.

 Using the installer to delete a previous version of Mesa, or to install over a
 previous version, does not always find all of the earlier versions of Mesa's
 DLL's.  The SYS2070 error is the run-time error message that OS/2 will display
 in this case.  If this happens to you, the easiest solution is to type the
 following command at the root directory of each drive that could be accessed
 via OS/2's LIBPATH:

 DIR MESACORE.DLL /s

 This will locate any previously existing copies of the Mesa DLL's.  Switch to
 the directory indicated by the results of that command, and either delete or
 rename the Mesa DLL's that are there.  Then re-install Mesa for OS/2.  If that
 does not resolve the problem, please contact Athena Design's technical support
 at [e-mail], or via fax at 1.617.426.7665.

 1. Selecting a range at 50% or 25% Zoom.

 We've made a number of improvements to the display logic, and one of the side
 effects is that selecting an area of a worksheet that requires scrolling at
 these zoom settings will leave screen lines on the display under some
 situations.  These are display remnants, and minimizing/restoring the screen
 will clear them up immediately.  We recognize that they are unsightly,
 however, and will be working to remove them in a future version of Mesa for
 OS/2.

 Additionally, selecting multiple overlapping discontiguous ranges will cause
 the overlapped region to display inverted or not, depending on the number of
 overlaps.  That is, if you select a1:b20, and a5:e5, the overlap block (a5:b5)
 will be inverted twice, and therefore will appear uninverted.  If you then add
 the range a4:af6, the overlap range (a5:b5) will be inverted thrice, and will
 appear inverted again.  This is purely a visual effect; the ranges are
 inclusive regardless of their appearance.

 2. File association types and extensions.

 There are a number of concerns relating to the relationship between file-name
 extensions and file-type associations during file saving and exporting. We are
 aware of them and are looking into a coherent solution to them.

 Currently, if you do not include an extension in your file name, Mesa for OS/2
 automatically appends one based on the file type you have chosen.

 If you do include an extension, Mesa for OS/2 sets the file type based on that
 extension. If the extension is ambiguous (as with XLS, which can mean either
 Excel 3 or Excel 4 format), Mesa for OS/2 chooses between the permissable
 options based on the file type menu settings. If the file-type menu setting is
 not an allowable option (for example, if the file name is output.xls and the
 file-type menu reads Mesa 2 spreadsheet file), an intelligent default is
 chosen (in this case, Excel 4 worksheet format).

 When loading files, the Type of file: listbox refers to extended attributes as
 well.  If you have (for example) Lotus 123 files created from a DOS or Windows
 version of Lotus, those files probably do not have the 123 DOS Spreadsheet
 extended attribute set, so you must set the Type of file to All Files, and
 then type the filename mask that you desire in the Open Filename: box.

 3. File exporting and importing.

 Within Mesa for OS/2, Excel 4 means Excel 4 worksheets, not workbooks.
 Currently, we do not support Excel 4 or 5 workbook import or export. It is on
 our list to add in a future release.

 Also, we are aware that not all formating information comes through on import
 and export. We will be continually improving this behavior; however, we
 decided to make the bulk of the data-transfer functionality available now
 rather than wait until our next release to provide the whole thing. Please let
 us know what particular features are missing that are important to you.

 4. Selection manager issues.

 The selection manager communicates with the application on a regular basis to
 update itself. This can sometimes interfere with controls - for example,
 entering values in spin buttons or choosing entries from list boxes - when the
 manager updates itself during an edit.  The bulk of these problems have been
 corrected in this release - working with the selection manager should be a
 much more pleasant experience.  However, there may still be times when values
 are reset if chosen incorrectly.  We are aware of these, and will be working
 to correct them in a future release.

 5. Graphs and graphics issues.

     Graphs do not take text as headers for 3x3 ranges

      It works correctly for other range sizes as far as we know.

     Graphing discontinuous ranges

      If you select a discontinuous range and graph it, Mesa builds a virtual
      range by appending the second and subsequent ranges underneath the first.
      We recognize that this is not the right behavior for selecting multiple
      columns, and will be revising this behavior in a future release.

     Pie charts default to Group Rows, even if you really want Group Columns

      If you select a single column of data and create a pie chart from it, the
      graph will appear as a single color.  Right-click on the graph, choose
      Graph Settings, and change the Orientation radio button from Group Rows
      to Group Columns, and you will see the pie chart draw itself correctly.

 6. Printing issues.

 There have been a number of printer problems identified by our users. We have
 worked with IBM to identify problems in several drivers, and some of these
 problems have been fixed in the Warp FullPak drivers. We have installed
 workarounds in our code for several others.  However, there are still many
 issues left unresolved that we will be working on for future releases, either
 to fix ourselves or to work with IBM to fix. Among the issues that have been
 reported:

     Row and Column headings are sometimes inverted
     Colored text sometimes prints as black.
     Non-outline fonts are extremely slow
     Landscape printing doesn't work on HP IIIP PostScript printer (Apple
      LaserWriter Plus emulator)
     Blank pages are often added to the ends of files on HP DeskJets and
      LaserJets.

 If you run into these or other printing issues, please let us know exactly
 what happens, and provide the following information:

     Version of OS/2
     Printer
     Printer driver (name, version, date, size)

 7. Swapping on a Pentium machine.

 We have been able to crash Mesa while performing operations on large (i.e.
 over 150,000 cells) ranges.  These crashes only seem to occur on Pentium
 systems, and only seem to occur in instances of heavy swapping.  At this
 point, we believe the problem to be related to the OS/2 memory allocation
 routines during swapping.  We are making IBM aware of this issue.  If anyone
 is able to reproduce these crashes on other machine architectures or without
 introducing substantial swapping, please contact us so that we can track down
 the problem.

 If your work requires you to work with large files, our recommendation at this
 time is to increase your system RAM, or work in smaller stages.  Turning off
 Undo will also help reduce the RAM requirements of Mesa.

 8. Problems with various bitmap files

 There are a number of different .BMP file formats available, and Mesa only
 handles one of them gracefully.  We have seen bitmaps get imported with
 incorrect colors, and have seen problems with saving out bitmaps (to a file or
 to an undo stream) of certain types.  We are aware of these issues and will be
 working to improve them in future versions.  For now, we recommend that you
 save your file before importing any bitmap image files into a Mesa workbook.

 What happened to Mesa 2.0.3?

 We released Mesa 2.0.3, and then learned of several bugs that were important
 enough to stop shipment of the application.  While we were fixing those bugs,
 we also made a number of performance improvements.  We hope you enjoy the new
 version of Mesa, and we apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.