History Lesson: Quattro Pro and the Leftover Spreadsheet

Scotts Valley at half the Lotus price

On 30 September 1987 the Los Angeles Times reported that Borland International of Scotts Valley had introduced Quattro, a spreadsheet priced at $195, against Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.01 at $495. The First Circuit later noted a public release in 1987 after nearly three years of development. COMPUTE!'s May 1988 review still listed $195.

The pitch was speed and polish on hardware people already owned: faster recalculation — including "smart" recalc that touched only the formulas that mattered — presentation-quality graphs, Lotus file compatibility, and a loadable 1-2-3 menu tree. COMPUTE! called the menu tool Menu Builder; macros ran if the proper menu was in use. Unlike Lotus at that moment, Quattro was not copy-protected — again the LA Times's framing in early 1988.

The name is a taunt

Philippe Kahn was Borland's founder and CEO in Scotts Valley. To the LA Times in January 1988 he said: "Quattro means four in Italian, as in the next number after 1-2-3." That is the naming story. In the same interview he told the paper they had orders for more than 70,000 copies from dealers in the first two months — Kahn's claim to a reporter, not an audited shipment count.

Quattro, then Quattro Pro

Quattro was the first spreadsheet. Quattro Pro was the successor. Borland's own 1991 book says Quattro Pro was released in the final months of 1989. The Washington Post reviewed it on 11 September 1989. Personal Computing's April 1990 review covered Quattro Pro 1.0 at a $495 list price — the half-price story was already aging.

The first product's native worksheet was .WKQ. Quattro Pro's DOS worksheet was .WQ1. Same family of ideas; different type numbers in the file. A program that only knows Lotus .WK1 will misread a .WQ1.

Lotus 3.0 power on a 2.2-class PC

Quattro Pro's marketing angle was the power of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.0 on hardware that could still run Release 2.2. Personal Computing described it running on an 8088 PC with 512K through modular programming Borland called VROOMM — Virtual Real-Time Object-Oriented Memory Manager. Up to 32 windows. Not true three-dimensional sheets yet; linking across files instead.

Windows late; the notebook is the answer

UPI, from Scotts Valley on 10 September 1992, reported Quattro Pro for Windows announced and due in stores later that month after missed dates — Borland's first Windows application. Microsoft and Lotus had shipped Windows spreadsheets since the previous year. Suggested retail was $495. The same wire named a Price Waterhouse volume license for Quattro Pro for Windows and Quattro Pro 4.0 for DOS on over 25,000 PCs — a named customer, not a market-share claim.

COMPUTE! in April 1993 said the notebook is what separated the product: 256 pages, tabs at the bottom, right-click to rename. That is why the extension moved from WQ* (worksheet) to WB* (notebook / workbook).

Lotus sued over menus, not files

Borland did not copy Lotus code. It copied the words and structure of the slash-menu tree so users could switch without rewriting macros — the First Circuit's account. Two devices mattered: the Lotus Emulation Interface, which showed Lotus menus and was later removed, and then Key Reader — in plain language, a switch that ran existing Lotus keyboard macros (slash-menu keystroke sequences) without showing Lotus menus. Neither was a file-format feature.

Lotus sued on 2 July 1990 over the menu command hierarchy (469 commands), not over .WQ1 versus .WK1. On 9 March 1995 the First Circuit held that the menu hierarchy is an uncopyrightable "method of operation." On 16 January 1996 the Supreme Court split 4–4 (Stevens recused) in a per curiam affirmance — it affirms, and it sets no nationwide precedent.

The leftover lesson is about lock-in. Macros were the lock-in. Excel 2003 documentation is blunt: Excel 2000 and later do not run Lotus or Quattro Pro macros.

Sold twice: Novell, then Corel

Novell closed the Quattro Pro deal on 24 June 1994 (8-K filed 7 July 1994): $110 million cash for the Quattro Pro product line plus $35 million cash for a three-year Paradox license (up to 1 million copies) for the suite. Press often said $145 million for the spreadsheet business. Both can be true; the larger figure includes the Paradox license. The same week's WordPerfect merger was reported around $1.4 billion.

Corel's deal was announced 31 January 1996: 9.95 million Corel shares plus $10.75 million cash for PerfectOffice, WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and related software, plus a minimum $70 million royalty over five years for other Novell technology. Headline dollar totals in 1996 clips disagree — stick to the press-release cash-and-shares terms.

WordPerfect Office 2021 still includes Quattro Pro (Corel, GlobeNewswire, 6 May 2021). The last dated vendor patch found for that line is WordPerfect Office 2021 Update 1 with Hot Fix 1, 28 July 2022. Corel did not discontinue Quattro Pro in 2021.

Extensions as a fossil record

Borland's 1991 table, in their words, mapped the neighborhood:

• .WKS — Lotus 1-2-3 1A; .WK1 — 2.01 / 2.2.
• .WKQ — Quattro 1.
• .WQ1 — Quattro Pro.
• .WKP — Surpass (a predecessor format Pro could still read and write; later company histories say Borland bought Surpass programs in June 1988).
• .WKZ / .WQ! — compressed with SQZ!.

Later generations, as preservation catalogs such as PRONOM describe them:

• .WQ1 — DOS versions 1–4.
• .WQ2 — DOS 5.0 and 5.5 (multipage notebooks on DOS).
• .WB1 — Windows 1 and 5.
• .WB2 — Windows 6.
• .WB3 — versions 7–8.
• .QPW — version 9 onward (still the Corel / WordPerfect Office default).

Lotus, early Excel, and Quattro all store a sheet as a stream of records: typed chunks with a type number, a length, and a payload. Excel's old .xls used a related record stream sometimes called Binary Interchange File Format. Modern .xlsx is a zip of XML — a different species. Same idea, different opcodes. A Lotus-only reader will not understand Quattro's type numbers.

Later .QPW sits in a Microsoft-style compound file — a mini file system inside one file, the same container old Office .xls used. Practitioner notes (SheetJS) mention stream names like PerfectOffice_MAIN, and a beginning-of-file version that often encodes the letters QPW. That container is why Excel cannot casually open a QPW the way it once attempted older Quattro worksheets.

There is no public specification for the DOS formats (Johan van der Knijff / Open Planets Foundation, October 2014). Excel 2003's Quattro Pro converter opened .WQ1 with hard limits: only the active sheet's text, values, and formulas; rows 1–8192; graphs from Windows Quattro Pro not imported; most formatting lost; macros do not come across.

Excel 2007 shuts the door

Microsoft's current support tables say .wq1, .wb1, and .wb3 are no longer supported in Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 — cannot open or save. The break starts with Excel 2007, not a later release. Microsoft does not list .wb2 or .qpw on that table. Excel 2003 still documented the limited Quattro Pro converter above.

The files outlive the market

The VA Technical Reference Model still lists Quattro Pro (page validated 15 January 2026; decision 28 August 2019): it may help accessing, viewing, or converting older documents created with Quattro Pro before the organization standardized on Microsoft Office. Counties still buy WordPerfect Office as a suite — for example, a Gwinnett County, Georgia, WordPerfect Office Standard maintenance quotation dated 1 July 2026. That is a suite buy, not a Quattro-only purchase.

A .wq1 or .qpw on a share from 1994 is not nostalgia. It is a budget, a membership ledger, a church treasurer's book. The application that wrote it may be gone. Excel will refuse it. The bytes are still a Quattro notebook.

If you need those numbers in Excel or as CSV, convert them on this PC. Do not upload a financial archive to a random website.

Legacy File Converter reads .wkq, .wq1, .wq2, .wb1, .wb2, .wb3, and .qpw (and the rest of a mixed pile) locally on Windows and writes XLSX, CSV, PDF, and other modern formats. Nothing is uploaded.