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Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux

This is a native port of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 to Linux. There's an article documenting how this is possible here.

Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of Lotus 1-2-3 on Linux.

liveupdate_smallhelp_smallstock_smallperspective
Interactive, live-updating ASCII-art charts.Context sensitive help.Highly configurable graphs.Work with multiple sheets.

See more screenshots and gifs in the wiki.

Building

Dependencies

First, you need a version of binutils that is compiled with coff-i386 target support. You can check like this:

$ objdump --info | grep coff-i386

Note: Most distributions do not enable this for some reason.

Run the included binutils.sh to download and compile a version of binutils known to work for this.

Secondly, you need a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX, you can download it here. Just place the raw disk images in the build directory and run extract.sh.

Finally, just run make.

Packages

The following packages are required

UbuntuFedoraDebian (bookworm)Ubuntu (bionic)
build-essentialglibc-devel.i686build-essentialbuild-essential
gcc-multiliblibgcc.i686gcc-multilibgcc-multilib
lib32ncurses-devncurses-static.i686lib32ncurses-devlibncurses-dev:i386

Installing

Run make install to install into /usr/local.

Run make install prefix=/my/prefix to install into a custom prefix.

Run make uninstall or make uninstall prefix=/my/prefix to uninstall.

Running

Just run ./123 in the project directory after building, or, if you installed it, run 123.

Getting Started

There is a quick start guide in the wiki here, and the full manual can be seen here here.

There is a man page in share/man/man1/123.1 that describes the command line options.

Lotus 1-2-3 has context sensitive online help, you can press <kbd>F1</kbd> at most times to see some hints.

Note: You use the <kbd>/</kbd> key to open the 123 menu!

If you've used any spreadsheet before, you should be able to get started quickly. Functions use @ instead of =, but the common functions like @SUM, @AVG, @INDEX, and even @HLOOKUP all work as you would expect.

FAQ

If the status indicator in the top right says READY, try /Quit Yes.

If it doesn't say READY (it might say ERROR, HELP POINT, MENU or something else), try hitting <kbd>Esc</kbd> until it goes back to READY.

You have a very old gzip with broken lzw/pack support. You can try running the gzip.sh script to build a more recent gzip, then rerun the extract script.

See the full FAQ for more.

Bugs