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Comments on Casady & Greene's new K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Spreadsheet), from MacChamp–Vermont MUG

K.I.S.S. from Casady & Greene

by John Guttler

Let’s Keep It Simple Spreadsheet (L.K.I.S.S.) by Casady & Greene is just what it says it is: a simple spread sheet program. If you are not interested in seeing what goes on in every cell of your spreadsheet or in typing in formulae, this may be for you.

L.K.I.S.S. requires System 7.0 or later and 8 meg of Ram on the machines it will run on. These DO NOT include the Mac Classic, Mac Plus, SE or Power Book 100. You will also need a utility called Mode 32 to run on some other machines. Mode 32 is available free from Casady & Greene. If you have the right machine you then need to have 7.6 meg available on your hard drive.

Installation on my Power Mac 6100/60 went smoothly from the two 1.4 meg floppies. The installation program selects the correct (Fat or PowerPC) version and does a full installation. There is also capability to custom install either version if desired.

Once you have completed the installation and fired up the program you are presented with a busy selection of palettes and tool bar options with which to go about using L.K.I.S.S.
I followed the user manual tutorial to set up a simple spreadsheet and found both the tutorial and the program easy to use. L.K.I.S.S. differs from most spreadsheet programs in that you are not presented with a blank grid in which to start entering your data and formulae. Instead, it’s like building with blocks available from the palettes.

You first select a simple grid or set of cells from the palette and drag that to the open window. You can then enter your data and add row or column headings, or if you prefer, drag “operators” (+,-,*,/,etc.) from another palette and connect blocks of cells together. You can build your own operators and save them for future use as well. Once you have entered the data the calculations are performed according to the operators you have selected.
Graphing is accomplished much the same as data entry. You select the style graph you want from a palette and drag it over the grid of data you wish graphed and the results are displayed immediately. I preferred this to the method I have had to use in some other spreadsheet programs.

Several other toolbar options allow you to turn off the (annoying) sound effects or choose manual or auto recalculation. There is also a palette with background patterns and one for choosing fonts.

Once you have created a spreadsheet you can choose to save it as a template for future use by adding it to the list of pre-installed templates such as Loan Amortization, Expense Report, or Car Lease calculations.

In addition to the User Manual, Balloon Help is available as well as an Apple Guide to fall back on. The User Manual seemed adequate for the questions I had.

John Guttler

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