History Lesson: Quattro Pro and the Leftover Spreadsheet

The files on the share are older than the OS that cannot open them

A leftover Quattro Pro folder is rarely one mysterious icon. It is a mix of extensions that look adjacent to Lotus 1-2-3—`.wq1`, `.wq2`, `.wb1`, `.wb2`, `.wb3`—plus modern WordPerfect Office `.qpw` notebooks. Double-click them on a current Windows PC and Excel shrugs. That reaction is the end of a product story that started when Borland of Scotts Valley priced a spreadsheet against Lotus, not when someone invented a new cloud format.

This is a history of that product line and of the binary leftovers it left on disk. It is not a how-to for opening every extension; the companion piece for that job is the format guide elsewhere on this site.

Two products: Quattro, then Quattro Pro

Quattro was the first spreadsheet. The Los Angeles Times on 30 September 1987 reported that Borland of Scotts Valley introduced Quattro at $195, against Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.01 at $495. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit later treated the public release as 1987. COMPUTE! magazine’s May 1988 coverage still listed Quattro at $195. Treat “1987 introduction / still sold into 1988” as the timeline—not a single “launched in 1988” date.

Quattro Pro was the successor. A 1991 Borland book places the product in the final months of 1989. Personal Computing’s April 1990 issue reviewed Quattro Pro 1.0 at a list price of $495. The Washington Post published a review on 11 September 1989. Those sources disagree slightly on calendar framing; together they put Quattro Pro in late 1989 into early 1990, not as a rebrand of the 1987 Quattro.

Why it was called Quattro

Philippe Kahn was Borland’s founder and CEO. The Los Angeles Times in January 1988 quoted him on the name: “Quattro means four in Italian, as in the next number after 1-2-3.” That is the naming story the company told the press. Kahn also told a reporter the product drew “70,000 orders in two months”—his claim to a journalist, not an audited shipment figure.

Why Quattro spread on DOS machines

Reviewers and ads pushed speed and smart recalculation, graphs, Lotus file compatibility, and a loadable 1-2-3 menu tree. COMPUTE! in May 1988 described Quattro’s Menu Builder for that Lotus-style slash menu. The Los Angeles Times in 1988 also noted that Quattro was not copy-protected, unlike Lotus 1-2-3 at the time—an adoption detail that mattered to offices tired of key disks.

Quattro Pro’s pitch, as Personal Computing framed it, was Lotus 3.0-class power on a 2.2-class PC: an 8088 with 512K of RAM via VROOMM (Virtual Real-Time Object-Oriented Memory Manager), up to 32 windows, and sheet linking instead of true three-dimensional worksheets. The list price by then was $495.

The Lotus lawsuit was about menus, not .WQ1 versus .WK1

Lotus sued over copied menu words and menu structure—not over Borland’s spreadsheet code. Key Reader let Quattro Pro run Lotus slash-menu macros without displaying the Lotus menus. The fight was menus and macros, not whether a `.WQ1` file was the same bytes as a `.WK1`.

The suit was filed on 2 July 1990. On 9 March 1995 the First Circuit held the Lotus menu command hierarchy to be an uncopyrightable method of operation. On 16 January 1996 the Supreme Court affirmed by a 4–4 tie, which left the First Circuit result in place without creating nationwide precedent. Separately, Microsoft’s Excel 2003 documentation notes that Excel 2000 and later do not run Lotus or Quattro Pro macros—useful context for anyone hoping an old macro still drives a leftover workbook in modern Excel.

The extension zoo Borland documented in 1991

A 1991 Borland table mapped the early extensions: `.WKQ` for Quattro 1; `.WQ1` for Quattro Pro; `.WKP` for Surpass; and Lotus `.WKS` / `.WK1`, which Quattro products also read and wrote. Later DOS notebooks used `.WQ2` (DOS 5.0 / 5.5). Windows Quattro Pro used `.WB1` for Windows 1 / 5, `.WB2` for Windows 6, and `.WB3` for versions 7–8. From version 9 onward the default became `.QPW`, which remains the WordPerfect Office Quattro Pro default.

On disk, early worksheets are a stream of typed records—type, length, payload—the same broad idea as Lotus worksheets and old Excel `.xls`, but with different type numbers. A Lotus-only reader therefore misreads a `.WQ1`. The Windows product stored a notebook: COMPUTE! in April 1993 described 256 tabbed pages. Later `.QPW` uses a compound file—a mini file system inside a single file, in the same family as old Microsoft Office compounds. The Open Planets Foundation noted in 2014 that there was no public DOS Quattro Pro format specification. Excel 2003’s WQ1 import was limited: active sheet only, rows 1–8192, no Windows Quattro graphs, and no macros.

Windows Quattro Pro arrived late—and expensive

UPI on 10 September 1992 reported Quattro Pro for Windows as late, with stores expected later that month, a $495 price, and missed earlier dates. The same wire noted a Price Waterhouse license covering more than 25,000 PCs—evidence that large professional services firms were already standardized on the line before the Windows port settled.

Novell bought the line; Corel bought it again

Novell’s 24 June 1994 Form 8-K described $110 million in cash for the Quattro Pro line plus a $35 million Paradox license. Contemporary press often summarized the spreadsheet business as a $145 million deal; keep those figures separate rather than collapsing them into one headline number.

Corel announced on 31 January 1996 a deal for 9.95 million shares plus $10.75 million in cash. Hedge any rolled-up “total purchase price” headlines that mix stock and cash without saying so. WordPerfect Office 2021 still included Quattro Pro as of Corel’s 6 May 2021 materials. The last dated product patch located for this research is 28 July 2022—so do not read a 2021 suite release as a 2021 discontinuation.

Why the leftovers still show up in 2026

Virginia’s Technology Reference Model still lists Quattro Pro (validated 15 January 2026; decision dated 28 August 2019) as a way to open work created before the commonwealth standardized on Microsoft Office. Gwinnett County, Georgia, has a WordPerfect Office maintenance quote dated 1 July 2026—suite maintenance, not a Quattro-only line item, but proof the suite remains a procured product.

On the Microsoft side, `.wq1`, `.wb1`, and `.wb3` are unsupported in Excel 2007 and later. That is an Excel 2007 break, not a 2010 one. Excel never claimed a first-class `.qpw` open path. The practical result on a modern PC is the same: leftover Quattro Pro notebooks sit on the share until something that still understands the record types or the compound file converts them.

What to do with the leftover spreadsheet

If the goal is readable grids in Excel, CSV for a system load, or PDF for an audit packet, convert on the machine that already holds the archive. Quattro Pro Converter is built for that local job: `.qpw`, `.wq1`, `.wq2`, `.wb1`, `.wb2`, `.wb3`, and related Quattro extensions become modern outputs without uploading models to someone else’s converter.

Teams that already batch-convert into a folder sometimes keep Conversion Library Plus as the private on-machine library over those XLSX, PDF, and CSV outputs—search and preview on this PC, nothing uploaded. The history lesson ends where the files become usable again: on disk, under your control.