Wingz

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On: 2014-04-14 23:30:30
Updated by: InkBlot
On: 2023-09-14 16:22:28
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What is Wingz?

While Wingz isn’t the first spreadsheet to include graphics tools, it is the only one that lets you create 3-D charts and that gives access to the full range of Mac II colors. If you’d like to create bar charts that look like cityscapes, stacked charts that bring to mind mountain ridges, or line charts that resemble flying carpets, Wingz is the only speadsheet that can do it for you.

Wingz is also generally easy to work with: menu items are well placed, the manual is excellent, and the program’s structure is so similar to Excel’s (for example, = before formulas, $ before absolute references) that Excel users should be able to use Wingz with little training. In addition, Wingz has a full measure of ingenious minor features.

Unfortunately, the program lacks some features we have grown to expect in Mac spreadsheets.

Unlike Excel, Wingz lets you spruce up worksheets with lines, arrows, circles, polygons, and text fields. Wingz’s ability to place charts on a worksheet, instead of in a separate document as Excel requires, makes it better for presentations. In all fairness, however, Full Impact provided these features months before Wingz (actually Trapeze provided them first). The one major advance in worksheet layout that Wingz offers is the ability to add a scroll bar to text fields. If you are creating templates for others to use, a scrolling text field can be an invaluable way of providing instructions.

Easier to Use, but There's a Catch

Wingz replaces the time-consuming dialog boxes found in other spreadsheet programs with 26 submenus that control everything from simple functions like changing the font style and type size, to more advanced activities such as setting the attributes and format of numbers, sorting database entries, choosing a chart type, and scaling the worksheet. While the single-mouse-click nature of submenus is convenient, there are times when you might want more choices than a submenu can hold. Excel and Full Impact, both of which make extensive use of dialog boxes, usually offer more alternatives. In Wingz you can’t format dates as: month, day, year (for example, July 3, 1989). Nor can you format integers to display leading zeros, or eliminate the leading zero to the left of a decimal point, as you can in Excel.

Wingz offers an efficient method of specifying sort keys without using a dialog box, but this feature, too, is a doubleedged sword. You don’t lose functionality with the lack of a sort dialog box, but you do lose the ability to check and alter your sorting plan before you actually sort. To add sort keys, you select the columns or rows one at a time in order of sort preference, selecting Add Ascending Key or Add Descending Key from a submenu each time. The database then sorts in the order you select. If you selected the sort columns in the right order, you’ll like Wingz for making il so easy, but if you are as prone to error as I am, however, you might want to be able to preview tlie list of selected sort keys and edit them, as you can in ExceFs and Full Impact’s son dialog boxes.

Fill is another example of a Wingz function that's either convenient or inconvenient, depending on how you use it to fill cells with incremental numbers. It’s a great feature for generating lists of consecutive numbers or dates. Just type in the first number, select the range of cells by dragging the cursor, and choose Fill from the Select submenu. Nothing could be simpler. But when you are adding increments other than one. Excel and Full Impact let you use a dialog box to specify how much to add to each number and at what number you should stop. The same operation is more cumbersome with Wingz. You must type the start value in the first cell and then enter the stop value in the last cell of the range. Wingz then automatically divides the difference between the two values by the number of cells in the range and adds the result incrementally to each cell.

Surprises; Pleasant and Otherwise

Wingz has some pleasant surprises that will make you wonder why rival spreadsheet developers hadn’t thought of them first. But you’ll also wonder why Informix omitted certain features generally considered desirable by spreadsheet users.

One nice addition that can save you time in creating and debugging worksheets is the capability to select a range of cells by type of data. For example, you can select all text, value, formula, or error cells. You can also select all blank cells, all unreferenced cells, or all cells having a direct or indirect formula reference to or from a specified cell.

An unwelcome surprise is that when you select a row or column and format it, Wingz formats only the filled cells. You can’t, for example, format a column to have a dollar sign appear before all numbers you enter. In Full Impact or Excel you can click on a row or column designator, and the entire row or column will be selected. You can then specify, for example, that all text be fomiatted in bold. If you select column A, from that point on, everything you type in column A will be formatted in bold. With Wingz, if you select a full column or row, only those cells which contain data will be formatted. The blank cells (which probably make up the vast majority of cells in the row or column) are not formatted, and anything later typed in those cells will not contain the specified format.

A potentially more serious drawback is that Wingz doesn’t save in SYLK. You can save your worksheet in text, but when you export the resulting files to Excel or Full Impact, you will not be able to include formulas. You can, however, import SYLK files and either import from or export to Lotus’s 1-2-3.

3-D Wins

If Excel, Full Impact, and Wingz were all just arriving on the market today, Microsoft’s Excel would probably be considered a weak cousin and would have to sell for less. Now there are thousands of commercial and private templates and macros available for Excel, dozens of books and training materials, a large installed base, and the promise of version 2.0; but if the three spreadsheets were starting together from scratch, either Full Impact or Wingz would be a better choice. These two products are close in functionality. While I prefer Full Impact’s greater number of choices over the easier-to-use submenu system incorporated in Wingz, I would ultimately buy Wingz because it can create three-dimensional charts. Trust me, it’ll make you the life of the boardroom.

Stevens, Lawrence. (June 1989). Wingz 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 148-149).


Download Wingz for Mac

(176.29 KiB / 180.53 KB)
Wingz v1.1a / Examples floppy / DiskCopy image, compressed w/ Stuffit
29 / 2014-04-14 / 2019-04-26 / a55aa38561d8023fe671125c99e0ff72208a08d2 / /
(339.37 KiB / 347.51 KB)
Wingz v1.1a / Program floppy / DiskCopy image, compressed w/ Stuffit
42 / 2014-04-14 / 2019-04-26 / 9f74e195d9acc11670ee0bffe5d19f1f9045a313 / /
(329.14 KiB / 337.04 KB)
Wingz v1.0 (1989) / compressed w/ Stuffit
22 / 2019-04-26 / 59c2154c0fdd56283a733993f26d31924f8aa1cb / /
(951.92 KiB / 974.77 KB)
/ Zipped
12 / 2021-11-12 / 0b2d991e3d85785158a2cbfaeb43157f50e787d1 / /
(574.3 KiB / 588.09 KB)
/ Zipped
4 / 2021-11-12 / 8e47c730d9b6f4f961da4cbb0d7ec2cfd1102fdf / /


Architecture


Motorola 68K



System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 9.2





Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

  • Macintosh Plus
  • 2 MB RAM if using with MultiFinder
  • Second disk drive
  • Hard disk drive recommended


Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac





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