A spreadsheet is just the old idea of a large piece of paper divided up into squares. Along the top axis you write months or categories. with others along the side. You can show how many of something you have sold, bought, acquired, or destroyed for each unit of time. It could be categories of household expenditure, but it could just as easily be an analysis of anything with components which make up a larger unit.

A piece of paper, however, has a finite size, you have to draw all the squares, do all the calculating yourself, rub out entries, write new ones, and if you want to compare the first column with the last, fold the paper overl With MasterCalc, the Amstrad does it for you.

Via a detailed manual. complete with teaching tutorial and a series of menus, you are led to set up the sheet with the number of rows and columns. Up to 3000 squares are allowed. If you find you want certain columns totted up, tell the computer, and if you require more complex calculations, you can enter up to 99 different formulae. Just inform MasterCalc which ones you want in which squares. Then press a key and all the arithmetic is done for you in a flash! The contents of the screen can then be output to a printer.

Better still, however, is the possibility for asking "what if'?" questions. Suppose you had all your motoring details on the sheet, including miles per gallon, repayments on the car, servicing costs, petrol costs, depreciation costs etc. and you wanted to know whether buying a more "economical" car would save money. Simply change the m.p.g. figures, together with the relevant costs, then press a key. and the new total costs, and monthly costs can be seen at a glance. Equally impressive is the ability to draw histograms for up to three categories from your chart in the blinking of an eye.

Not content with that, MasterCalc allows you to overlay columns next to each other, which would otherwise cause you to have to switch to another display, and to split the screen so that the extreme off screen section of the sheet can be displayed under the current area. If you forget your formulae, it reminds you which is where, and the eight byte floating point arithmetic holds your numeric data with great precision.

The whole package is very friendly, though I would like to have seen all the features taught in the tutorial, and a screen dump of the graphs for more than just Epson printers, together with more examples of uses. Even so, these are small gripes. Almost 100% machine code, and equally compatible with 464 and 664, MasterCalc is, like Masterfile before it, a masterpiece.

D.M.