Quattro Pro

Borland Quattro Pro is a DOS spreadsheet program, that was later also available for Windows.

History

Rather than exiting the market sector and focusing on their development tool range, and despite the protestations of some of the board members, the company went out and bought a company called Farsight Software in January 1988, but that company sold a spreadsheet called Surpass that had got excellent reviews but only fairly modest sales despite having a feature set that outdid all of their competitors. But instead of releasing Surpass under the Quattro Pro name after an initial rebrand and minimal code and feature fixes to make it look more like the original Quattro, Borland inexplicably decided to port the code from Modula-2 to their own Turbo Pascal at the insistence of Philippe Kahn and TP author and main developer Anders Hejlsberg.

Not only did this delay the introduction of Quattro Pro for more than a year, it was ending up being released in late 1989. Despite Borland spending considerable time and money refactoring the code to be faster during the TP port, the end result was embarrassingly enough considerably slower than the original Surpass. The only reason for the port was the mistaken belief that Turbo Pascal was somehow a superior development system to the STS-XP used in originally developing Surpass, but in reality TP was a single pass compiler, this made it execute very fast, but generate slow code.

The Quattro Pro package sold very briskly with more than 100 million USD worth of sales in less than a year, got rave reviews and seriously ate into the sales of Lotus 1-2-3, the mere difference of the size of Borland vs. the original developer somehow made their product a much more serious and saleable product. But the delay may have ended costing the company dearly, QP pro sales were so brisk that by 1991 the package was on the brink of taking over 1-2-3's position as the clear market leader and the standard for doing spreadsheets on PCs, but that was interrupted by the exploding sales of Microsoft's Excel. Had the package been released a year earlier the company would have been the market leader in the field, and Borland, unlike Lotus, actually had a MS Windows spreadsheet to sell to people so was in a position to defend that position from the onslaught of Excel much better than 1-2-3 did.

Version

DOS

• 1.0 (1989)
• 1.0 Special Edition (1991)
• 2.0 (1990)
• 3.0 (1991)
• 4.0 (1992)
• 5.0 (1993)
• 5.5 (1995) Novell
• 5.6 (1997) Corel - bundled as a part of WordPerfect Office 6.2 for DOS

Quattro Pro for Windows

• 1.0 (1992) – also included with Borland Office for Windows
• 5.0 (1993) - also included with Borland Office 2.0 for Windows, Workgroup Edition
• 6.0 (1994) Novell - also included with Novell PerfectOffice 3.0
• 6.01 ()
• 6.02 (Jun 1995) - Improved OS/2 Message Loop handling
• 6.03 (Nov 1996)

Publications

• Patrick J. Burns: Using Quattro Pro - Que 1990, ISBN 0-8802-2562-9
• Mary V. Campbell: Quattro Pro Handbook - Bantam Computer Books 1990, ISBN 0-553-34654-7
• Stephen Cobb: Using Quattro Pro - Osborne McGraw-Hill 1990, ISBN 0-07-881546-0
• Stephen Cobb: Using Quattro Pro 2 - Osborne McGraw-Hill 1990, ISBN 0-07-881704-8
• Craig Livingston; Rhyder McClure: Fast Access/ Quattro Pro - Brady Books 1990, ISBN 0-13-307612-1
• Craig Livingston; Rhyder McClure: Fast Access/ Quattro Pro 3.0 - Brady Books 1991, ISBN 0-13-307091-3
• Alan Simpson; Douglas J. Wolf:The ABC's of Quattro Pro 3 - Sybex 1991, ISBN 0-8958-8838-6
• Mary V. Campbell: Quattro Pro 4.0 Handbook - Bantam Books 1992, ISBN 0-553-37041-3
• Mary V. Campbell: Quattro Pro 5 for Windows Handbook - Random House 1993, ISBN 0-679-79199-X