Why should I use Matrex if Excel 2007 supports multithreading?

One of the peculiar features of Matrex has always been the fact that functions are executed in different threads.
Now Excel 2007 supports a similar feature, so one could think that there are less reasons to use Matrex instead of Excel.
But that's wrong: the multithreading capabilities offered by the two products are different.

Purposes

Excel

Multithreading has been added to Excel to use both the cores in the new double core processors (Intel Core Duo and AMD X2).

Matrex

Matrex has introduced multithreading before these processors became popular and the purposes are the following:

• Don't block the GUI during the function calculations
• Get immediately the results of some calculation without to wait for the whole project (worksheet) to be recalculated.
  
• Avoid that I/O dependent functions (formulas) block CPU intensive functions.

Sure, Matrex is also able to use both the cores of a double core processor, but that is only a side effect of its multithreading feature.

Implementation

Excel

I don't have details on the implementation, but that is what I think happens:

When you recalculate a sheet the first time, all the dependencies among cells of the sheet (formulas) are examined and based on this the sheet is divided in 2 parts (or 4 if you have 4 cores) .
Each part is calculated by a thread.

Matrex

Matrex uses a pool of threads. Each function is calculated by a thread of the pool.
In this way the whole Matrex internal engine is multithreaded.
Only the GUI runs as a single thread, with which the other threads need to synchronize when matrices, charts or presentations are displayed in the viewers.


Conclusions

Multithreading has been just added to Excel to use well the dual core processors, but it is not a main feature in Excel: a part of the fact that the calculation is divided in 2 or more threads, the system works as in the previous versions.

Matrex is instead built on threads. They are everywhere: functions, matrices, presentations, charts, timers and the GUI have to cope with them.

Printing support

To print, version 1.0 of Matrex converts the content of the table (matrix or presentation) to a web page and opens a browser with it. So you can print the web page from the browser.

This works fine, but is not very professional. So why I don't print directly from Matrex? The reason is that SWT, the user interface library I'm using, does still not allow to print in Linux.

But it seems that this will change in SWT version 3.3. So I will surely add the possibility to print directly from Matrex in version 1.2, or may be even 1.1 of Matrex.

Help on line

Today Matrex got an help on line!

The plan for version 1.1 of Matrex includes a context help.
The context help is made as a set of linked html pages, one for each window and dialog of Matrex, so that it is possible to open the right page when pressing F1 on one window.
This feature is more or less ready and I thought that it could be nice to have already all the help html pages as a help on the web.

So, if you have a problem understanding what is the purpose of the view, open the content page of the help, click on link for the window and read!

The content page is also reachable from the documents web page of the Matrex site.