Quattro Pro

Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite.

Historically, Quattro Pro used keyboard commands close to Lotus 1-2-3. It is commonly said to have been the first program to use tabbed sheets. Actually, Boeing Calc had tabbed sheets earlier. It currently runs under the Windows operating system. For years Quattro Pro had a comparative advantage, in regards to maximum row and column limits, (allowing a maximum worksheet size of one million rows by 18,276 columns). This avoided the 65,536 row by 256 column spreadsheet limitations inherent to Microsoft Excel, (prior to Excel 2007). Even with the maximum row advantage, Quattro Pro has been a distant second to Excel, in regards to the number of sales, since approximately 1996 to the present.

When version 1.0 was in development, it was codenamed "Buddha" since it was meant to "assume the Lotus position", #1 in the market. When the product was launched in 1988, its original name was Quattro (the Italian word for "four", a play on being one step ahead of "1-2-3"). Borland changed the name to Quattro Pro for its 1990 release.

The common file extension of Quattro Pro spreadsheet file is .qpw. Older versions of Quattro Pro used also the following file extensions: wb3, wb2, wb1, wq2, wq1.