CA-Cricket Graph is the simplest popular graphing program in the Macintosh market, and simplicity has its proponents. When Macworld surveyed 11 charting programs recently..., our preference for DeltaPoint’s more feature-laden DeltaGraph Pro resulted in a storm of letters from Cricket Graph fans. The essence of these letters was that Cricket Graph is a nice, comprehensible program that you can master quickly, and you won’t need retraining each time you use it.
Cricket Graph (CG) provides a spreadsheet for data entry, and easy text-file import (but not direct Microsoft Excel file import). Besides the basic four-function math on spreadsheet columns for producing new, transformed columns, CG offers advanced functions, along with binomial and moving-average data smoothing. For scatter, line, and quality-control data (CG supports standard quality-control chart types), there’s a curve-fitting option that will fit data to arbitrarily complex curves, and the option includes error bars.
If these features sound to you more like engineering than business elements, you’re getting the point. CG includes a large assortment of black-and-white chart formats to accompany its 2-D-only chart types — you can add depth to columns or bars, but that’s not true 3-D. Still, CG’s formats will let you convert tables of data into aesthetically pleasing black-and-white charts ready for scientific publication in just a few minutes, and it’s clear that careful design went into the font selection, sizing, and layout of these formats. The resulting charts, in color and black-and-white, look seriously better than any analogous default chart types in Excel.
That’s a key point in the CG buying decision. It’s not just that CG has 12 chart types compared with DeltaGraph’s 50-odd. It’s that Excel, the program where your data is likely to reside already, has 40 or so chart types itself. But CG’s charts just look better than Excel’s, unless you’re willing to spend hours tinkering, customizing, and saving a repertoire of Excel AutoFormats (the equivalent of style sheets in a word processor). Basically, when you buy this product from Computer Associates you’re paying someone who has fine-tuned optimized chart formats for you. That’s not a bad bargain.
The Last Word Cricket Graph’s features are just right for charts in the physical and social sciences, but lack the pizzazz for a big-ticket venture-capital presentation. The program is easy to learn and use, and includes math features for data transformation and curve fitting.
Seiter, Charles. (December 1994). CA-Cricket Graph III 1.52. Macworld. (pg. 75).
Computer Associates International, Inc.
Applications
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Cricket_Graph_III.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
