Re: NB Li Feng Seminar is nearly over with big issues outstanding

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mason A. Clark wrote:

>  One for Charlie Mueller
>
>  John Legge's Excel sheet is in Excel 97.  It cannot be used in
>  earlier versions of Excel, such as my Excel 4.  This is a trick of
>  Microsoft -- changing the coding -- to force us to buy the
>  new version.   (For me, Excel 4 is otherwise all I need.)
>
>  There is a free Excel Viewer, but we cannot make the
>  changes that John Legge planned in his sheet.
>
>  There may be a way around this.  In Excel 97, save the
>  sheet as an earlier version, at least as early as version 4..
>
>  A little example of the power of monopoly.

Oh, come now. Everybody upgrades and tries to force you to go along. Adobe,
certainly no monopolist, puts out new versions of PageMaker, Illustrator,
and Photoshop about once a year. With upward file incompatibility too, of
course.

As much as I hate to admit it, Excel 98 (the Mac version of Excel 97) is an
improvement over earlier versions too. It's not just a monopolist's trick.

Doug