I am a new member so I hope my comments are not violating any protocols for this particular forum. In particular, they may seem inappropriate. I personally think not since they pertain to older, discontinued, Mac software that I believe was unique and powerful. There was a spreadsheet-like program in the early days of Mac development that I really loved. It was called Trapeze.

Trapeze had a free-form construction tool that allowed the creation of a spreadsheet block anywhere on the screen. Cells were found within the block and each block required a name or title. Within the block the normal A....ZZ labeling conventions for cells applied. Blocks could also contain text, graphs or graphics. All that was required was a name for each block. Blocks could be moved and positioned anywhere on the screen, giving the program some of the characteristics of a page layout program. And the number of functions was incredible! It was wonderful.

I believe it really failed because users at that time simply couldn't handle a spreadsheet that wasn't like 1-2-3 or VisiCalc. The icon conventions were also rather unique, although, I believe, pretty easy to learn quickly. And of course, blocks had to reference blocks by name, not really much different than using range names in Excel.

It would be great to have this program back (if it will work on present day Mac systems). But it would be even better if someone would develop a modern program for OS X that was very much like it. I have heard that Ragtime has features somewhat like Trapeze.

This is fascinating! I've never heard of Trapeze, but it sounds a bit like the wonderful if short-lived Spreadsheet2000 (formerly the ghastly-named Let's Keep It Simple Spreadsheet), which Casady & Grene marketed in the late 90s. It had a graphical-oop interface where you built functions out of grids and connectors - very like Cycling74's music app Max, if you've ever come across that. It was absolutely brilliant and completely ruined you for normal spreadsheets ever after. It made spreadsheets creative, beautiful, and (not least) intelligible; you could see the structure of your calculations at a glance, thanks to the flowchart graphical model, and with a bit of design intelligence you could build in visual checks so you could see it was working properly at different stages of complex calculations. But as you say with Trapeze, spreadsheet users are extremely conservative, and it was just too radical to catch on - you had to think in a completely different (better, but different) way about how complex calculations are represented graphically.

Nick.