What is Full Impact 2?

Full Impact 2.0, From Ashton-Tate, is the first spreadsheet program that can directly import and export files in Excel formal without going through an intermediate format such as SYLK. Full Impact now imports files (including function commands) from Excel 1.5 and 2.2 and exports files directly to Excel 2.2. Compatibility with Excel is reflected in other ways too, including keyboard commands and equivalent-function capabilities. But Full Impact 2.0 goes beyond Excel with some new features, including 3-D graphics, 32-bit color, custom data formats, programmable buttons, and improved presentation capabilities.

Contending with Excel

Full Impact is easier to use than Excel but is easiest to learn if you’ve never used the latter program. Full Impact’s menu commands, for example, are more accessible than menu commands in Excel, which often conceals them in nested dialog boxes. Creating and changing charts is also much easier in Full Impact, But Excel users won’t feel completely abandoned, because Full Impact 2.0 includes more of Excel’s keyboard commands — such as Fill Right and Fill Down — than its predecessor contained. In addition, the new Custom Keys command, which is located on the File menu, lets you modify keyboard command quivalents or create new ones.

To provide even more functions, Ashton-Tate created the Extended Function Pack, which installs into your copy of Full Impact 2.0 (extended functions incI ude operations such as Transpose and Lookup). It adds 50 new functions to the Functions menu, giving you most of those found in Excel plus some that Excel doesn’t have.

Overall, these functions translate very well between the two spreadsheet programs. A Full Impact file saved in Excel format appears on the desktop as an Excel icon and is in almost every way a real Excel file. Each program still contains a few functions that do not translate and are imported as text, but most of the common functions can work in either program. One notable exception that's not translated is Excel’s mathematical function LOG , which must be manually changed to Log when translated to Full Impact.

The drawback to using extended functions is that they are much slower than Full Impact’s native functions. For the most part, Full Impact matches Excel’s performance. Full Impact proved to be slightly faster than Excel for arithmetic calculations and slightly slower for functions. Extended functions cause a tenfold increase in the recalculation times in the chart — more than 3.5 minutes for a complex 20,000-cell recalculation that takes Excel only 15 seconds!

Painless Charting

Charting in Full Impact has always been easier and more versatile than in Excel. Graphs are created in one step, appear right on the spreadsheet, and can be moved around or resized anywhere on it. Updating charts is also easier than in Excel.

Charting in version 2.0 has been improved with new chart types and presentation enhancements. The 3-D views for bar, stacked-bar, and surface Charts work better than in some plotting programs, To change the perspective, just grab a corner and rotate the plot. You can now also overlay two charts of different types, a feature Excel has had for some time,

Full Impact also excels in presentation features. A page-layout screen contains rulers and margins. The Draw menu contains tools for several shapes and for text blocks independent of cells that can be moved around the spreadsheet like graphics.

You can now customize data formats and have them appear on the Format menu. Formats can be used for chart labels and can include color changes for different values. Full impact now supports 32-bit color, and 32-bit-color PICT images can be pasted into spreadsheets.

Paragraphs, imported graphics, or any graphic object can be used as a button to activate a macro written in FullTalk, Full Impact's powerful macro language. Although you could previously use FullTalk to completely customize a spreadsheet, the new button capability greatly aids in the creation of new data-management applications. Another powerful feature of FullTalk is its equivalent to HyperCard's XCMDs, which can be used to invoke subroutines in other programming languages. FullTalk has been further strengthened with 20 new commands, and it has the ability to find and replace function text in the macro script.

One of Full Impact's drawbacks was the amount of RAM it required, but Excel has almost caught up as a memory hog. Excel 2.2 takes 1,024K, and Full Impact 2.0 uses 1,280K. Full Impact, however, has its own virtual-memory implementation, which uses the hard disk to store infrequently used data when it runs out of RAM. This feature lets Full Impact spreadsheets fill more cells (up to 524,288) than any other Mac spreadsheet program, even though the maximum spreadsheet dimensions (256 columns by 2,048 rows) are considerably smaller than Excel's.

This upgrade has shrunk file sizes, which naturally benefits large files the most. A single-cell spreadsheet consumes 5K in Excel and 23K in Full Impact, but a 20,000-cell spreadsheet fills 392K in Full Impact whereas Excel requires 666K.

The Bottom Line

Ashton Tate has done a good job of cleaning up Full Impact’s deficiencies and improving its advantages. If you need to use the Extended Function Pack for most of your spreadsheet work and your spreadsheets are large, however, Excel is still the best bet. But if you do a lot of charts or want to use a spreadsheet for presentations. Full Impact is the clear choice over Excel. I’d also pick Full Impact for developing in-house applications and macros. The best point is that with Full Impact’s Excel-import and -export capabilities, there is no longer any risk of being stranded between the two programs.

Rizzo, John. (January 1991). Full Impact. MacUser. (pgs. 58, 60).

Download Full Impact 2 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II