Quattro Pro

Historically, it used keyboard commands strongly reminiscent to Lotus 1-2-3, and was the first to use the "tabbed notebook" metaphor. It currently runs under the Windows operating system. It is known to have less-capable calculations than Microsoft's Excel. For example, in many versions, subtracting dates fails to produce the number of days between two dates. However, for simple graphs most feel that it produces superior results. Quattro Pro also avoids Excel's long-standing worksheet size limitation of 65,536 rows by 256 columns, with a maximum worksheet size of one million rows by 18,276 columns.

When the product was launched in 1988, its original name was Quattro (from the Italian word for "four"; a play on being one step ahead of "1-2-3"). Borland changed the name to Quattro Pro for its subsequent 1990 release. Also, when version 1.0 was in development, it was codenamed "Buddha" since it was meant to "assume the Lotus position."

The original Borland Quattro spreadsheet was a DOS program written in assembly language principally by Adam Bosworth and Lajos Frank. It was a flop in the marketplace, and Borland quickly acquired a replacement product called "Surpass", written in Modula 2. The principal designers and programmers of Surpass were also hired by Borland to turn Surpass into Quattro Pro: Bob Warfield, Dave Anderson, Weikuo Liaw, Bob Richardson and Todd Landis.

See also