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The Xess3 Spreadsheet

Stacey L. C. Clark

Have you ever been frustrated because you need to do a few quick calculations, and you wished you had a spreadsheet available? Well, xess3\fP is on the Suns and HP's! (The 3 indicates that this is version 3 of Xess - The Advanced Spreadsheet for Business & Technology.)

To use this spreadsheet on a Sun:

1. Login to a Sun workstation.
2. Type: xstart.
3. Type in an xterm window: xess3 &.

To use this spreadsheet on an HP:

1. Login to the HP workstation.
2. From the bottom left area, use the left mouse to click on the icon of a computer. This will bring up a window.
3. Move the pointer to that window and click the left mouse button to permit typing in that window. Type: xess3 &.

To Exit Xess3:

1. Click with the left mouse button on the FILE area of the menu.
2. Pick: Exit. Choose to save or discard your current spreadsheet.

The important parts of the Xess display are the menu bar, dialog boxes, and Help. You can enter data by moving to the cell you want, and typing. (You can move either with the arrow keys or the mouse.) If you wish to enter text, you can make sure it is labeled as text by typing an apostrophe (') before the text. Xess assumes if you start typing letters, that you are typing text. However, if you type the date as 12/24 instead of 12/24 you will get the calculation results, instead of a date!

Making corrections is easy. You move to the cell you wish to correct, press the F2. key, then use the mouse or arrow keys, and the backspace or Del keys.

It will not be long after you start using Xess3 that you will want to copy items or repeat calculations. There are two quick keystroke methods to do this. When starting at the cell you wish to copy, typing: control-v makes copies of the values or control-f makes copies of formulas. (Move to the cell where you wish to copy the information, or highlight a group of cells, then press Return. This information is translated as "relative" calculations unless you "fix" the cell names by using the $ character.

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Example:
A1\fP has the value of 120
A2\fP is A1+10, which is 130.

If you copy (control-v) cell A2 to A3,
the new cell (A3) will be: 130

If you copy control-f cell A2's formula to A3,
the new cell (A3) will be: A2 + 10

If cell A2 instead had in it: $A$1 + 10
then using control-f will create an identical A3: $A$1 + 10

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The most often used built-in function is summation. =@sum(a1..a9) will add cells a1, a2, .., a9 and print the sum. You can pick which cells to sum by highlighting those cells with the mouse or actually typing in the cell names separated by two periods. Other built-in functions are specified under HELP (in the right hand upper corner of the menu bar.) They all start with an equal and at sign (=@).

Other modifications available concern the appearance of the spreadsheet. You can change cell formats to display the information in numerous ways, such as dollars, scientific notation, etc. Pick cell format from the Format menu item.

Two other important features are Printing and Graphing. Under File, Xess allows you to save the file in different formats, or directly print to your ECN printer. (You will want to specify postscript under Printer Options.) Simple graphs are easy to do, and you can even do surface and contour graphs from Xess! First pick Graph, then modify your graph via Edit and specifying Data Sets... options.

ECN Short Course
Beginning to Use Xess3
FRIDAY, February 2nd 11:30 - 12:30

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