Electronic financial tools.

In business, the bottom line is numbers. And when it comes to manipulating figures, spreadsheets do the trick. In case you haven't noticed, today's electronic spreadsheets do more than simple calculating and recalculating. The leading brands help you with basic accounting needs and financial tasks, including financial analysis, statistical models, sales forecasts and invoices.

The difference you'll find in these programs is their ease of use and layout capabilities. Some programs have more powerful analytical tools than others.

Long considered the spreadsheet leader, Lotus 1-2-3 continues to dominate the PC-DOS arena (there's also Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows).

In the Mac environment Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet is more popular. Of course, Excel for Windows is nothing to sneeze at either. In fact, the latest version may just blow you away (more about that later).

Now, the big question: What should you look for in a spreadsheet? It all depends on what you want. The descriptions below may help identify your company's needs and the programs that will best help meet them.

Lotus 1-2-3 ($459). What's nice about Lotus is a feature called the Magellan viewer, which lets users see and work on information stored on the hard drive before actually loading a file. Moreover, the Backsolver and Solver features provide meaningful "what-if" scenarios. For example, you can get mathematical solutions for a production plan that's designed to maximize profits.

Quattro Pro for Windows ($49.95). Formerly sold by Borland International, Word-Perfect's spreadsheet is superb when it comes to graphics and charts. Quattro Pro features three-dimensional, multiple work sheets. That makes this program great for doing presentations. Another nice feature is a menu bar for simple push-button operations.

Excel ($340). In the areas of flexibility and accessibility, the latest version of Excel for Windows 5.0, is the winner hands down. Microsoft's revolutionary object-linking embedding language already made sharing information across applications possible. Now, a new text import feature claims to make it easier.

Other improvements include data management, so sorting through files isn't as much of a chore. Better still is a new data modeling tool, PivotTable. This feature allows you to summarize data into categories, say total sales by product and region. Another neat new feature is Excel's multipage, notebook-style worksheets similar to those in Quattro Pro. They're also in 3-D.

As with previous versions, the downside is that Excel is a memory guzzler. Ideally, you need more than 15MB of hard disk space to take advantage of the Windows environment.