![[A Supporting Screen Shot]](images/Mesa2Float.gif)
Welcome! I'm sure you'd like to know why I'm making these pages. You're asking, "Why do you use Mesa 2?" I have to admit, I get stupid and sentimental about things. I'll try to answer the unanswered questions that some of you may ask. I hope you'll contribute to this list if you have a good Mesa 2 story.
It was a little bit of everything. I resented Corel for causing me to go as far as reformatting my hard drive and re-installing Windows 95 in a futile effort to get WordPerfect 7 to work. I didn't like anything in Microsoft Office when I migrated to OS/2: The ergonomics weren't very friendly. I got in a shouting match with a lady at Lotus because I wanted to look at 1-2-3 for OS/2. IBM Works didn't have the power (especially for printing) that I needed. StarOffice was slow and in beta at the time (sound familiar?). In that respect, Mesa 2 won by being the only choice.
However, there was a part where Mesa 2 won by good deeds. It's a solid, friendly spreadsheet for idiots like me. I want to be able to tweak code, sure, but when I'm not in the mood for it, I don't want to work hard for my results. Mesa 2 excels for people with this attitude. The Mesa 2 demo got me through two chapters in Lotus 1-2-3 homework and preserved my "A" in my Intro to Computers class. J. Daniel Kulp showed me enough MScript to make an auto-formatting accounting spreadsheet, and I didn't even own Mesa 2 at the time! Yeah, that was a cool touch. Also, it's a powerful spreadsheet. It's up to the task of my extremely nasty work and lets me work efficiently.
Mesa 2 is a quiet and understated program. It has no fancy pull-handles, no arrow cursors, no glove pointers, and no pointers that look like a ripoff of the Red Cross logo. It has plenty of function without need for visual aids.
There is no bubble help for the toolbars. The the Mesa 2 equivalent of bubble help shows in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. I don't have to worry about how my video drivers will handle it, and I don't have to wait to see the help.
One of my favorite parts, though, are the page breaks. There are no dotted lines to keep me from viewing my borders. They're just small red lines in the row/column headers.
![[2 Breaks]](images/PageBreak.gif)
There are no Wizards, and the titles are subtle. Even in Mesa 2 2.2 PreRelease, Mesa 2 makes no mention of that awful sales pitch "publish your files to the Web!" Instead, there's a simple menu option Export Selection > HTML. Mesa 2 makes little effort to hype or single out impressive features, and that's the part that impresses me.
I don't like to make mistakes. However, I absolutely despise it when a program gives me a pop-up message to remind me of my incompetence. It adds insult to injury, and I become frustrated. Mesa 2 doesn't do much of that. If you enter a circular reference, it types !CIRC in the appropriate cells. If you drag a selection over a block of data, Mesa 2 will let you destroy your data without protest. It knows that I genuinely want to destroy that data, and if not, it knows that I'm just smart enough to press Alt-Backspace to undo my mistake. When it does get in my way, it's subtle and impersonal. The pop-up messages happen without a beep and are like "An Error Has Occurred: The requested file could not be opened as its type is unknown."
![[Screen Shot of Error]](images/Mesa2Error.gif)
With the wording and the thin fonts it uses, it could be stating, "An error has occurred, I'm not placing the blame on anybody. Would you like a beer?"
Mesa 2 has good ergonomics. If you just go with the stock Mesa 2 setup, there's plenty of menus with really simple menu items. Mesa 2's designers realized that if they named a menu item Style, then I'd get confused. I like my format menu to be called Format and my font menu to be called Font. I like blunt applications.
The use of notebooks in Mesa 2 is very effective. The settings for Workbook, Page, Sort, Range, Find & Replace, Graphic, and Graph are in one notebook. I can work for minutes at a time without closing one modal dialog to get to another one.
The keyboard shortcuts have been placed well and are very convenient. They might be placed as well here as they are in other spreadsheets. I use the keyboard to get to most of Mesa 2's features. I just found them in Mesa 2 and not in other spreadsheets. See my part on features.
I have a lazy definition of the word "feature." A feature is something I can reach in less than ten minutes, including reading the on-line help and the instruction manual. I'm easily intimidated, too. If I see ellipses (...) on every menu item, then I probably won't want to find (or use) that feature. I think the big exception to this rule is HTML Studio, but most of HTML Studio's menu items lead to very simple dialog boxes. Most of Mesa 2's functions are handled through two-level menus, so I see most of the functions right away. I don't have to deal with single-purpose dialog boxes very often (if ever). Even adding a script is as easy as right-clicking on a page tab and choose Add Script. If I want some food for thought on that script, I can choose Options => Script Recorder.
I found the MScript scripting functions. I think these are cool, and I'm not very good at REXX. I have to read the INF help at least once every time I make a script. MScript is a good macro language. I've learned enough Access Basic to where I want something to be simple. MScript is simple. The help for it is extremely good.
I found the graphs. I use graphs in spreadsheets more often than I did in the past. I found the regular functions, too. I don't think there are as many functions in Mesa 2 as there are in Quattro Pro, but there are more than enough to keep me happy. This term, I have both Discrete Structures (logical math) and Linear Systems (matrix math). The matrix functions and logical functions have been perfect.
I found the OS/2 part. If I want to use the mouse to copy a cell, I Ctrl-Drag the cell. If I want to move the cell, I can drag it or Shift-drag it. I can drag a color from an OS/2 color palettes to a cell to change the cell's color. I can Ctrl-drag the color to the cell and change the font's color. There's more of that kind of stuff, but you get the idea. Mesa 2 is very Warped. There are few (if any) buttons like OK or Apply in the Selection Manager because my changes take effect without closing the notebook. They're just like OS/2's object properties notebooks in that respect.
Mesa 2 is stable. I managed to crash it because I'm a beast. It kept happening when I was slinging the horizontal scroll bar back and forth over and over to test it. J. Daniel Kulp sent me a fix for it, and it's now extremely hard to crash Mesa 2, at least in almost a year of normal-to-harsh use. Usually, I can do really nasty things to Mesa 2, and I see my more malicious attempts thwarted.
The support for Mesa 2 is killer. In the few times I've asked for support, I can't recall a support E-mail taking more than 36 hours to get an answer. The answers were always correct, too. That's scary. I never got the feeling that my letters are merely scanned over before I get an answer.
That's about all, for now. Have fun!