What is The Cruncher?

Finding the answers to real-life math questions is fun and easy with The Cruncher, the amazing spreadsheet and graphing tool.

Features:

• Includes a full-featured spreadsheet and step-by-step animated tutorials.
• Quickly visualize, analyze, and display your information with cool pie charts, bar graphs, and more!
• Liven up your graph or spreadsheet with a whole library of awesome illustrations and outrageous sound effects.
• Highlight any words or numbers in your spreadsheet and The Cruncher will read them back to you!

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Kids and adults should like The Cruncher, a combination educational spreadsheet and business application. As a teaching tool, it shows kids spreadsheet basics; as a spreadsheet. The Cruncher can calculate and graph.

The Cruncher’s clever, creative animated tutorials demonstrate how spreadsheets calculate. A selection of projects shipped with The Cruncher can help kids figure out if their families can afford a dog or a new stereo. You can even customize recipes: using the Recipe Converter template, you type in a recipe and the number of people the original recipe serves, then indicate how many people you want to serve, and the template converts it for you. (This is a use I’d never thought of for spreadsheets — I’m sure my future dinner guests will be grateful.)

The animations are cute, but they make The Cruncher sluggish; on my Mac IIci, I often waited a few seconds before actions occurred. The Cruncher is aimed at families, teachers, and students, many of whom have lower-end machines and may find the application quite slow.

You can decorate spreadsheets with color text and pictures provided in the program’s Sticker Picker. You select an item in the Sticker Picker, assign a sound to it, and place it anywhere in the spreadsheet. The Cruncher also speaks: select a cell and hit a button, and a computerized voice reads to you. It even knows to read TN as Tennessee and lb. as pound. Why this is useful I’m not really sure, but kids will probably enjoy it.

The Cruncher performs basic spreadsheet functions like graphing, number formatting, and calculations. But users accustomed to more-sophisticated spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel will miss such functions as the ability to wrap text in a cell and to sort data. Also, calculation formulas can be hard to understand. For some functions, you can use basic spreadsheet functions like =D3/F3. But if you want to multiply that number by five, you have to write =SUM(D3/F3*5). It’s hard to know when you need to insert the function type (SUM, in this case) in the formula.

Aside from the calculation confusion, the only technical problem I had with the product was its sound. Even though my Sound control panel was set to zero. The Cruncher played music at a normal level — to the dismay of my coworkers — and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the startup sound. Other than that, the Cruncher is uncomplicated. Information is easy to find in the manual and online, and when I called, Davidson’s technical support was helpful.

The Cruncher is more effective as an educational tool: its spreadsheet capabilities are limited. If you can live without the advanced functions and can tolerate the slow speed. The Cruncher is a good spreadsheet choice. If you want to teach a child spreadsheet basics. The Cruncher will do the job.

Pearlstein, Joanna. (August 1994). The Cruncher. Macworld. (pg. 81).

Download The Cruncher for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

System Requirements

Macintosh Classic or higher; System 7.0 or higher; requires a 16 color capable system (supports 256 colors); 4 MB RAM with 2MB free; hard disk drive and CD-ROM drive and a mouse.

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II