Illustrations, comic-strip balloons, highlighted words and other typographical devices are interspersed. Across the top of each is a black-on-white strip with information for beginners across the middle and largest section is a black-on-color strip with the most important information, and across the bottom is a white-on-black strip with details for experts. Richard Saul Wurman is an "information designer." The book is organized, for the most part, into two-page topical displays. The information is up to date and well explained, and the presentation is, uh, unusual. The book is "Danny Goodman's Macintosh Handbook Featuring System 7," by Danny Goodman with Richard Saul Wurman (Bantam Books $29.95). It is another telling sign that the book, a California production, includes "earthquake proofing" under ergonomics. It is a telling sign of the times that a new book on computers begins with a section on ergonomics, ways of adjusting the viewing angle, keyboard height and lighting of your workspace to avoid discomfort at best and repetitive strain injury at worst. 93940 (408) 648-4000.įor those deprived of Macs, a Windows version is in the works. Users of Deltagraph 1.0 or 1.5 can upgrade for $69.95 by contacting the publisher, Deltapoint, 2 Harris Court, Suite B-1, Monterey, Calif. The suggested retail price of the program is $295. A full installation takes up 6.5 megabytes of hard disk space. Realistically, though, the machine should be an SE/30 or one of the II series. Please do not use them all in one presentation.Ī nice touch is a spelling checker, so you will not be embarrassed when you hand the boss a chart showing "Projected Third-Qurter Sales Figures."ĭeltagraph Professional requires a Macintosh Plus, Classic, SE or II with at least two megabytes of internal memory, System 6.0.2 or later (it makes use of the advanced features of System 7 if you have it), and a hard disk. Deltagraph even offers 32 ways of making the transition from one slide to another. This is a way of making a series of charts that can be shown directly on the computer's screen, as well as being printed out or, indeed, turned into actual slides. No presentation program these days is complete without a "slide show" facility. That means you can create customized blank charts, texts, backgrounds and other "objects," store them in libraries, or special files, and use them again and again. New to this version (Deltagraph first appeared in late 1989) are libraries. There are nine Postscript drawing tools for enhancing charts and more than 25 mathematical, statistical and data analysis functions for presenting scientific and technical information. The program works with either Postscript or Quickdraw printers. In fact, the program can be linked to worksheets created with Microsoft Excel, so that when the data in that popular spreadsheet change, the information and charts in Deltagraph are updated automatically. It is unlikely that any one individual could benefit from more than a few of the many selections, but it is comforting to know that they are there.ĭeltagraph Professional can take in data in many standard formats. A ternary chart, for example, shows "the percentage of a whole based on three parts of information," according to the manual. Meanwhile, down the hall on the technical side, someone else can be making scatter, polar, two-dimensional contour, surface, ternary and three-dimensional XYZ surface plots. On the business side, one can make the familiar column, bar, line, pie and bullet charts as well as the more specialized time line, spider, bubble, multiple pie and organization charts and several kinds of three-dimensional presentations. DELTAGRAPH PROFESSIONAL, for the Macintosh, is meant to produce such a wide range of charts and graphs for a business or individual that users will not have to resort to specialized programs, and to a remarkable extent it succeeds.
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