The abs Spreadsheet	Overview

A quick tour of abs !

State of the art Graphical User Interface. XY, pie and bar charts. ABVisual macro language Printing (postscript, fig, gif, etc...) multi-documents management. Interface with Microsoft Excel Running platform and status

State of the art Graphical User Interface

The graphical user interface of abs is similar to the ones of popular spreadsheet. It is based on the Xaw toolkit, this garantie a maximum of portability accross the Unix world. Click on the figure to see a snapshot of abs running.

XY, pie and bar charts

The purpose of abs is not to provide extended charting functionnalities but abs offer 3 kinds of charts: XY, pie and bar. These charts are very useful to give a quick vue of the data and they are exportable to Microsoft Excel if more advanced presentation is required. Click on one of the 3 figures to see a snapshot of chart examples.

ABVisual macro language

This programming language is compatible with Microsoft Visual Basic. Every line of code you write inside abs can be run inside Excel. The big interest of ABVisual is to run on a powerfull workstation the same kind of macro as on a Intel PC. Despite the fact that ABVisual is not yet as optimised as Visual Basic, you will get your result really faster because of the power of your workstation!

Printing

With abs, it is possible to print a selected array of cells or a whole worksheet. abs offer to produce either a file save under the fig format or to print directly to a postscript printer (using the external fig2dev program). The fig format file can be edited by the xfig drawing program and then printed or saved under the formats specified in the next column.

Name Language box LaTeX box (figure boundary) latex LaTeX picture epic LaTeX picture + epic macros eepic LaTeX picture + eepic macros eepicemu LaTeX picture + eepicemu macros pictex PiCTeX macros ibmgl IBMGL (or HPGL) eps Encapuslated PostScript ps PostScript pstex Combined PS/LaTeX (PS part) pstex_t Combined PS/LaTeX (LaTeX part) textyl Textyl special commands tpic TPIC pic PIC mf MF (MetaFont) gif GIF jpg JPEG (JFIF) xbm X11 Bitmap xpm X11 Pixmap (XPM3 package)

multi-documents management

20 documents open simultaneously, the limit to 20 is only a fixed number in the code an will become dynamic. Copy, Cut and Paste are possible between documents

Interface with Excel

The file format used to save abs workbooks is simply a text file (ASCII). This file is a Microsoft Visual Basic for Application program and so it can be directly runned into the Excel macro editor. Just running the 'main' routine will rebuild all the abs workbook inside Excel ( more... ). To export a workbook from Excel to abs, a simple macro is available here. This macro will convert the Excel workbook to a macro file that abs can read (more... ). If only some data has to be exchanged between abs and another software, abs offer the possiblity to read and write text delimited file. The separator can be a comma, a semi-comma, a tabulation or a space. Successive separator can be considered as one.

Platform and status

• The last release is 0.6a , a working development release.