A number of limited business packages are produced for the Electron - including a business graphics package called Graphs And Charts and a small planning program called Personal Money Management.

Graphs And Charts produces a set of graphic routines which can be incorporated into programs to present data graphcially in a range of applications. (See the screenshot above for an example.) The graphics include automatic scaling, labelling of axes, and use of colours.

Acorn has also included routines to draw two-dimensional graphs, three-dimensional graphs, stereo pairs, two-dimensional and three-dimensional contour maps as well as bar and pie charts.

The program itself costs £9.95 and an accompanying book costs an additional £7.50.

You wouldn't know it to look at the Electron, but this little machine can take on a good number of small business jobs, including word processing and spreadsheets.

Although it may seem a rather specialised function, the Electron's capacity for word processing suggests that an Electron with a good W/P program and a printer could easily make the household typewriter obsolete. However, not too much will be made of the word-processing functions until a printer interface is made easily available for the machine.

In terms of its layout, the construction of the keyboard and the feel of the keys, the Electron (with the addition of a printer interface) could easily take the title for being one of the best suited word processors in its class.

The Electron's built-in 80 column screen capacity also gives authors of word-processing packages the ability to quite easily develop proper full-width screens to preview pages exactly as they will be sent to the printer and to easily switch between the 80 and 40 column modes. Even on a low-resolution PAL TV you can write a letter in the 40 column mode and then switch to 80 column mode to see what it will look like when it's printed out.

The Electron also has dedicated Delete and Copy keys, along with independent cursor control keys. The availability of these keys makes it easier to control the cursor and do minor editing with the minimum number of keystrokes. They also make word-processing packages easier to write.

Spreadsheets are a familiar enough application - comprising more or less an electronic ledger that does all the calculations for oyu.

Visicalc is the most famous and uses an ordinary spreadsheet-type format to allow you to design your own on-screen ledger system - though it may be a while before Visicalc is available for the Electron.

In fact, it's not hard to write a "scratchpad spreadsheet" to show you a little about how spreadsheets work and what they do. (Figure 1.)

When you RUN the program, you'll first be presented with a question mark. This is to get the name or 'label' of the first column.

When you've answered that question and hit RETURN, reply to the next three question marks in the same way and you'll soon see something looking like a ledger.

There are four columns - A, B, C and D - well as two rows (1 and 2) which can be addressed quite simply. Look at the print-out (Figure 2) of the spreadsheet in use and then we'll explain the program a little further in detail.

In the first 'frame' of our spreadsheet program, we answered each of the questions regarding labelling with the answers: COST, CASH, VAT and PRICE - representing cost, profit, value added tax and final retail price respectively. Each of these factors relates the value of two products for which we are going to arrive at a retail price.

In frame 2, we get our first look at the spreadsheet itself. The statistics for product number 1 can be read from left to right along Row 1 and the statistics for product number 2 can be read from left to right along Row 2.

To start with, all values are 0 - so to get anywhere we have to start filling them in. Values are filled in from left to right and from top to bottom. So the first question mark below the spreadsheet is asking what value we want for the entry at A1: in this case, we reply with £2.50 (representing the COST of product 1).

The second question mark is also replied to with £2.50 (representing a 100 per cent mark-up on product 1) at A2. When we get to the third question mark, things begin to get interesting - here we are entering formulae instead of numbers and they tell the program to assign A3 with a value equal to the product of A1 and A2 added together and then multiplied by the current VAT rate.

The same procedure is carried out throughout the second set of question marks.

With the program's thirst for information satisfied the Electron's screen magically clears and a revised spreadsheet appears with all the numeric values handily calculated for you - showing the amount of VAT in boxes C1 and C2 and the final retail price in boxes D1 and D2.

The hard work in this spreadsheet is done mainly by the Basic keyword EVAL - which takes the formulae we entered after the question marks and works out the values for each of them. If EVAL finds out, however, that you're given it an expression which can be EVALuated, the spreadsheet will crash. In a full 'production' version of a spreadsheet program you would, of course, build in routines to have the program offer you a chance to correct your mistakes.

One other limitation in this very limited spreadsheet is that you can refer only to 'boxes' that have already been given values. If, for example, we entered the value B1*C1 in the box for A1 and then entered 6 and 4 respectively for B1 and C1 - the program would not produce 24 as the value for A1. The reason for this is because the program works through the boxes sequentially.

So, when the program comes to A1 and is asked to give it a value of B1*C1 - it will be 'confused' because you haven't yet stated what B1 and C1 are. The only option is to take the 'old' values for B1 and C1 and use them to produce a result, and if you've only just RUN the program, those values will be zero.