ON THE HELP SCREENS
The Quattro Pro Help system is a very valuable, built-in resource. It is a series of information screens that explain the program's commands and features. The file that holds these screens is about 400K in size, so you can imagine how extensive they are.
No matter where you are in Quattro Pro, help is always avail-able by simply pressing Fl or by clicking on the ? with your mouse. Help is context sensitive, so whether you are editing the contents of a cell or moving through the menus, a press of the Fl key will bring up a Help screen that gives you relevant in-formation about your position in the program.
For example, bring up the Edit-Names menu and highlight the Create command. Then press Fl. Your screen should look like the one shown in Figure 104.
Most of the Help screen in Figure 1.4 consists of useful infor-mation about the Edit-Names-Create command. Near the bot-tom of the text, the word Labels is highlighted. If you were to press .J, another Help screen would appear with information
F"Creating Block Names~-=================~
Create I To assign a name to a block of cells. choose /Edit Names
Figure 1.4: The Help screen for the Edit-Names-Create command
about the Edit-Names-Label command. A Help screen may have several of these keywords (each is in bold or a different color typeface), and you can simply move the highlighting to one of them and press ...I to get more information.
At the bottom of the screen in Figure 1.4 are three index keywords: Menu Commands, Edit Commands, and Block Names. You can highlight any of one of these, press.J, and see another screen of information related to the keyword.
There are just a few keys you will need within the Help system:
• f-,~,
i,
or.t: Moves between the keywords.• Home: Moves to the first keyword on screen.
• End: Moves to the last keyword on screen.
• F1: Brings up a Help screen for the Help system.
• Backspace: Shows the previous screen.
• Escape: Returns to the spreadsheet.
If there is more information than will fit on one screen, one of the options at the bottom of the screen will be Next. Choose it to view the next screen. That screen will also have a Next choice if there is yet one more screen, as well as a Previous choice that lets you return to the previous one.
There is a topical index for the Help system that is always close at hand. Press F1 while in the Help system, and a Help screen titled Using the Quattro Help System (1/2) will appear. Not only does this screen give you some information about using the Help system, but it also has a Help Topics choice at the bottom of the screen. This item brings up the table of contents for the Help system, which is the top level of all the Help screens; from it, you can branch down to any other screen.
This chapter has introduced you to the basic tools of Quattro Pro, the ones that will help you get to work quickly and with as-surance. The next chapter will present you with a nutshell tour of the process of building a spreadsheet.
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AN OVERVIEW
We will create a simple spreadsheet that calculates a car's mileage for a given set of gas fill-ups. You may be surprised at the number of steps involved for such a small project. In this ex-ample, you will perform the following tasks:
• Enter both text and numeric data
• Use label prefixes when entering text
• Write formulas
• Copy a cell to a block of cells
• Save a file to disk
• Work with multiple files in memory
• Apply formats to numeric cells
• Print your work
This exercise will give you a good idea of the powers of Quat-tro Pro. Some of the spreadsheet tools that are called into play may seem foreign at this early stage, but they all will be discussed in detail in other chapters.
Figure 2.1 shows how the spreadsheet will appear when finished. In the five columns, you will make the following entries and calculations:
• Enter the odometer reading at the time of the gas fill-up
• Calculate the miles driven between fill-ups
• Enter the number of gallons purchased
• Calculate the mileage
CH.2
• Compare each entry's mileage to another mileage fig-ure for a mythical "national average" for this model car One of the best features of a spreadsheet program is that you can start a project in any part of the spreadsheet and begin with any part of your data, formulas, or text. But it is always easier to start from the simple and work to the complex. For this project, that means starting the work in cell AI, and beginning with the structure of the spreadsheet, then working up to the data, for-mulas, and cell enhancements (or formats) .
File Edit Style Graph Print Oatabase Tools A4: (,!II) 39343
j A _ , •
Miles Gallons Mi leage Compared Driven Purchased to Avg.
~---=-425 13.5 31.5 99.3~
317 9 . 6 33 . !II 1 !II 4 . 2~
389 13.1 29.7 93.7~
172 5.5 31.3 98.7~
36 !II 1!11.3 35. !II 11!11.3~
4 !II 2 11 .9 33.8 1 !II 6 . 6~
2, !1165 63.9 32.3 1!111.9~
Options Window u.
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'_t-End
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... ---':ADY
7Figure 2.1: The completed Mileage spreadsheet