Until very recently, I hated estimating
programs made from spreadsheets.
Spreadsheet-based programs always
look great on the monitor: They're
like working with a sheet of paper onscreen,
you get to see all the estimating
data at once, and they're easy to
learn to use.
But that's about where the good
ends. When it comes to printing
reports, adding or eliminating items of
work, and general versatility, they're
usually lousy. I've seen so many bad
spreadsheet-based programs that,
when someone asks me to look at one,
I get queasy.
But all that changed recently when
I was asked to take another look at
the Precision series (which looks like
a spreadsheet-based program) from
Timberline Software. You see, I
already had tried a