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Recalc Or Die: Excel 1.0 Developers Celebrate Their Baby's 30th Birthday
theodp writes: This weekend, reports GeekWire, many of the original Excel team members are getting together to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the software's release. "We certainly ripped some stuff off," acknowledged Microsoft Excel 1.0 lead developer Doug Klunder, "but we also did some things that nobody else had done at the time and probably hasn't done since — some of which are really insane, and some of which turn out to be pretty handy." Klunder, who was responsible for Excel's killer "intelligent recalc" feature, quit his job after Bill Gates decided to shift the original Excel project from MS-DOS to the Mac, but ended up coming back and finishing the project after an ill-fated stint as a farm worker in the lettuce fields of California. "Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California," said Excel 1.0 program manager Jabe Blumenthal. "It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments." Many of the original Excel team members still use the program today — the RSVP sheet for this weekend's party was an Excel Online document. Before a professional naming firm came up with "Excel," the software was known by its code name "Odyssey", and other product names considered by Microsoft included "Master Plan" and "Mr. Spreadsheet." By the way, "Mr. Spreadsheet" makes his MOOC debut next week in edX's free-to-audit Excel for Data Analysis and Visualization course.
Still the best there is. Crushes all competitors like libre office and google docs. They can't handle complex formulas like Excel (tm) can do.
You wanna be the best? Use the best.
I love Excel
I love SAP.
Have you ever met a person that will say that they love spreadsheets?
If you say that you have, you are crazy, or they are crazy.
Lotus 1-2-3 was pretty cool, and Excel excels at novel ways to silently corrupt my data. :-(
People who play EVE Online. Excel with Visual Effects.
Otherwise the best of all the MS office suite
quoted from the summary:
[quote]the RSVP sheet for this weekend's party was an Excel Online document.[/quote]
And THIS is the problem with spreadsheets, people are using them for columnar text formatting, for lists and the like, and NOT calculations. If they wanted an RSVP list there's @#$@#$ iCal/Webcal/Google Calendar
Few people using a spreadsheet need anything more than integers and currency formats, and the odd percentage. If you're calculating millions of dollars and chopping odd percents and odd fractions here and there, and relying on a spreadsheet of any kind, you're in for a world of hurt.
Spreadsheets are used by every small/medium business, to tot up their earnings, which are invariably integer or - at most - two decimal places.
The kind of place that needs any more precision shouldn't be using a spreadsheet (e.g. mathematicians, engineering etc.) and/or should be double-checking every entry another way anyway (e.g. accounting, engineering).
Unfortunately for your mindset, there are MILLIONS of times more people doing their basic accounting in a spreadsheet - as they probably should if they don't want to pay a fortune to Sage - than frustrated mathematicians who can't afford MatLab, Maple or similar.
It's like asking why a bank prints out ten million customer statements using Word. They shouldn't be. But they might well draft something in Word to send to the printer or provide the template for the report output. But there are a million small businesses, authors, technical writers, lab technicians, lawyers, and a myriad other professions out there for whom Word is perfectly adequate.
Same thing.
instead of numbers! It sucks to type "123+456" and the output is simply the string. Why assume a *spreadsheet* is used for text if you enter numbers?
Excel did the job just fine until the ribbon UI came and MS decided that all those useless icons are more worth than the cells in spreadsheet. And since the file-menu started opening the full-screen crap, it was time for me to move on to alternatives which actually are now better than the Excel itself. After ms-office started using only two shades of grey as its UI, many are really forced to move the alternatives, as the UI is really too uncomfortable to use for a day.
I like Excel. It has a good user interface for editing tables. It has good cell formatting for representing currency. It has enough statistics to do basic stuff.
Even when I'm pouring data into R or a python numpy script, I'll usually run it through excel to get the csv right.
I would like it a lot more if it had serious statistical functions, unlimited integers, GF arithmetic and a proper scripting language.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
My old college roommate was a program manager for Excel from 1992 until about 1996, and he said they were working on that. It still hasn't been fixed so it works like every other Windows program.
That drives me nuts. As an old habit I cut blocks instead of simply hitting delete to keep a backup just in case. Cutting in Excel doesn't actually cut!
And if you paste into another program, what you cut from Excel is not deleted! I almost got fired a few years ago when I accidentally left in notes in a spreadsheet that was sent to a customer. I didn't notice that when I cut them and pasted them into JIRA that they were still in Excel.
Look, "this is news for nerds", not "hangout for freaks".
Go back where you came from!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
"He yelled up the basement stairs,
in excitement:
MAAA!
I POSTED IT AGAIN!"
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Me. I love spreadsheets.
I was a student in 1988. In my first year I was given the option to do my own project and I volunteered to write a spreadsheet, in DOS, (windows did not exist then) in text mode, in C. Because I wanted to. it was my idea. Because I always wanted to write a spreadsheet. Nice program too, it has the same key commands as Joe/Wordperfect. Still use it occasionally.
I like databases too.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
What is this GirlFriend arithmetic you are referring to ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Why aren't you hiding the ribbon when you are not using it.
Actually, I calculate today to be Excel's 30.00000001th birthday.
Ah, the heady days of the 80s, where even though such things as Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase existed you were encouraged to write your own versions.
Me, I wrote a GEM replacement in Turbo Pascal that took advantage of the massive resolution and colour space improvements in EGA from CGA to make a far nicer interface.
Windows did exist then, but was scorchingly expensive. We still don't talk about how bad version 2 was...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
use machine floating point
Yes, I means why not?
for people doing nothing of import
I use it every day to cumulate sales, hours, "normal" calculation such as adding number, date, multiplication and division between rows. Do I qualify as non-import task?
It's not that difficult to ditch floating point and use binary coded decimal. I think the x86 instruction set even handles these kinds of computations natively. And for financial stuff, even small time, mom-and-pop accounting, BCD is the only sane choice.
I admit it. I like Exel. I especially like VBA. Why on earth would I like VBA you ask?
I spent a long time working in a department highly reliant on statistics calculated from a lot of data. Many many tables of data used to generate and analyze other data. Working for a daily cheap company, MS office was all we were given to do the job.
We were not permitted to write custom apps or to install other software. The only sort of programmability we had was VBA. Some of the things we built too processes from being multi-day work to a matter of minutes letting VBA automate the tasks.
If you're not in a position where you can have a custom app developed to handle and calculate/manipulate large amounts of data, automating calculations already stored in spreadsheets is a life saver...
In all that time, Excel STILL rounds up large number and converts other numbers into exponentials when you paste them in.
Who on earth wants to paste a bunch of numbers in and have them automatically rounded up, as an option, fine, but automatically!
Equally WTF wants to use exponentials BY DEFAULT.
God I hate excel so much.
Why aren't you hiding the ribbon when you are not using it.
Most IT people and programmers, like the aforementioned anonymous poster, are not bright enough to RTFM.
Even Windows 8 wasn't difficult to use for anyone who could be bothered to spend a paltry handful of minutes googling for documentation.
All current office products (2013)
Office 2013 is not the current version.
Even after disabling the "animations" and "hardware acceleration"
You do realize that disabling hardware acceleration makes things slower, right?
FWIW, I see absolutely zero performance issues on my Windows laptop. Diagnose the performance bottleneck on your machine before you blame the software.
Few people using a spreadsheet need anything more than integers and currency formats, and the odd percentage. If you're calculating millions of dollars and chopping odd percents and odd fractions here and there, and relying on a spreadsheet of any kind, you're in for a world of hurt.
You obviously have never stepped foot on any financial tradefloor in the world have you?
Yup. Excel XP (2002) was the peak. The sad part about Excel 2013 is that on startup when the system is already under load you can see that the 2013 UI is a skin on the 2002 UI. There is a brief flash of the old version before the skin is applied. That is the heartbreaking part, the old product is still there under all the crud, languishing in its shame at having to wear this ugly and impractical dress they put on it.
Oh and the lack of the old offline searchable help files is demoralising as well. The new "help" sucks so bad by comparison it is almost useless.
They succeeded by ripped stuff mostly from Lotus, and creating undocumentated APIs that would give Excel an advantage under Windows and giving MS developers preferential access to OCX APIs and paying people to destroy their Lotus 123 System Disks :)
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2429/3635573389_7a34b231a2_o.jpg
I could not find a DOS screenshot, but would welcome one)
It is remarkably similar looking today, 30 years later.
http://www.bricklin.com/firsts...
http://museum.syssrc.com/artif...
Got no interest in it. Spreadsheets are something that a user would use.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
utterly inappropriate for anything demanding known precision.
That's why it works best with irrational numbers...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
All computer numerical models are imprecise.
Accountants have a favorite model. It's full of its own errors (like rounding many intermediate results to only two digits of fractional precision), but these are the errors accountants are used to seeing, regardless of how large the errors are. So they go on and on about how "superior" their model is when other models come up with slightly different results, even if those results might sometimes be closer to the abstract ideal. Accountants are smug in their knowledge that their peers can calculate erroneous results that exactly match their own.
I love SAP.
Come on now. Lets no say things we can't take back afterwards.
I love Lotus Improv. To this day, when I have any kind of complex spreadsheet work to do, I fire up a NeXTStation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Excel did the job just fine until the ribbon UI came and MS decided that all those useless icons are more worth than the cells in spreadsheet. And since the file-menu started opening the full-screen crap, it was time for me to move on to alternatives which actually are now better than the Excel itself. After ms-office started using only two shades of grey as its UI, many are really forced to move the alternatives, as the UI is really too uncomfortable to use for a day.
The ribbon in 2007/2010 occupies the same amount of space as the default toolbars in 2003. 2013 does increase the size a bit. However Double-click the tab names, or press Ctrl+F1 and they will collapse down.
I do think once getting over the initial learning curve, the ribbon is more intuitive than menus/toolbars.
MultiFinder had a workaround for Excel 1.x where it had to be loaded below the 1MB line.
Answer: no. I'm always amazed that people can still use Excel. I only use it a relatively small amount and run into nasty bugs. Is there really no one out there who can write a working spreadsheet?
Wow thirty years since MS ripped off VisiCalc.
I think the instructions to support BCD went the way of the Dodo when AMD created their x86-64 dialect which is the defacto today.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
GF Arithmetic is Galois Field Arithmetic.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Lotus 1-2-3 turned lots of accountants into programmers. Basically it used the menu keyboard patterns as commands (mostly pre-mouse days) so that one pretty much just made a list of keyboard sequences they already knew as a "program". Add an IF function and Go-to cell coordinates, and you have a Turing Complete language.
It was the closest we actually ever came to "programming for the masses". (Of course, it was spaghetti code only its mother could love.)
Excel's programming language is awkward even for programmers.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe not... http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wk... http://www.phusewiki.org/docs/...
I'm from Kuwait, you insensitive clod!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
but ended up coming back and finishing the project after an ill-fated stint as a farm worker in the lettuce fields of California
This proves that there were millennials even before the millennium. Applying labels to new generations of troublemakers must be the favourite past time of the appearance driven people.
You are so wrong it's funny. There are a breathtaking number of people using Excel to calculate millions of dollars and chopping here and there. They may be a small minority of Excel users, but they are still vast in number.
If you worked in finance you would know this.
And they are doing it wrong. And we haven't even discussed model errors.
Why assume a *spreadsheet* is used for text if you enter numbers?
Simple, spreadsheets are used primarily for entering data. The amount of data manually entered into spreadsheets is orders of magnitude more than the amount of formulas or code. The whole point of a spreadsheet is not to calculate 123+456, it's to calculate what's every value in column A + every value in column B and put the answer in column C. And best of all while the data may need to be manually entered or imported or filled by some database operation, your formula only needs to be entered once.
If you want to add two numbers together the program you're looking for is called "calc"
This. You don't see it in Excel (well I don't think I have); you see it when you pull your data into something else.
I have no respect for MS, they earned it. Nothing new or inventive, just take another persons idea and run the originator out of business copying that work.
I have seen MUCH better spreadsheets than MS - long ago when the field was more contentious.
MS, never the first, never the best, always marketed with more dollars than any other. *shrugs*
Not impressed.
Better hope there are fewer than 65536 of them and nobody's name is longer than 256 characters.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The first paragraph was from the GP I messed up the tags. The last line was mine.
Try reading the whole post before replying in future.
Unfortunately on TODaStWD I only saw people washing dishes, but I'm surprised they don't have something custom made. Excel is error prone to say the least.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I love SAP.
Then, you sir, are a sap.....
It's still alive? I regret that NeXTstep on HP 9000 or Sun workstations never took off. They would have been so much better than the 68k
Why aren't you hiding the ribbon when you are not using it.
Most IT people and programmers, like the aforementioned anonymous poster, are not bright enough to RTFM.
Even Windows 8 wasn't difficult to use for anyone who could be bothered to spend a paltry handful of minutes googling for documentation.
A shill and an idiot, perhaps both... Hiding stuff doesn't allow you to access the needed features, and RTFM in windows 8 or Excel? The FM is a Fing joke...just like windows 8 is a piece of steaming crap.
"by LinuxIsGarbage"... go shoot yourself in the face with a large caliber firearm you worthless pile of marking crap... The ribbon is crap, and you're a Fing liar:
http://peltiertech.com/wp-content/img200804/XL_2003_2007.png
Documentation of a craptastic interface, no matter how detailed, doesn't change the fact that the interface is craptastic.
I also love Excel
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
I had not expected so dryly pedantic an answer at such a question. Slashdot, yeah... <sigh>
( Disclaimer: I do know about GF Arithmetic. )
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
It's lightning fast on an 7-year-old PC. Check your anti-virus, memory use and hardware.
Doing GF arithmetic is probably an effective way of repelling girlfriends.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Évariste Galois' attempt at GirlFriend arithmetic didn't work out so well for him. The field he operated on only allowed two elements, and Galois was removed from the equation. But of course he knew that as he had done the math the night before.
1+1=0
I used to have a laptop that would take a 3x-5x performance hit when I enabled a high color display mode. The processor was still fast, but if you enabled 32-bit color performance of everything went to crap. If you downgraded your display to 16-bit color, fast as a rocket.
Sometimes your hardware may say that it supports some feature or another. Doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best thing to turn on...
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Answer: no. I'm always amazed that people can still use Excel. I only use it a relatively small amount and run into nasty bugs. Is there really no one out there who can write a working spreadsheet?
Let me guess, you're using Excel to analyse your daily 42 PB data feed from the LHC and solve the mysteries of the cosmos?
Because no one's interested in people who just use spreadsheets to keep a record of their monthly expense claim, or whatever.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Have you ever met a person that will say that they love spreadsheets?
If you say that you have, you are crazy, or they are crazy.
Anyone who ever had to add up multiple pages of multiple columns of figures with an electronic calculator loves spreadsheets.
They're like dishwashers or washing machines: they save time and produce better results than doing it by hand.
Do I love my washing machine? No, but I wouldn't want to get rid of it and go back to chucking rocks at my socks in a bucket.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think the instructions to support BCD went the way of the Dodo when AMD created their x86-64 dialect which is the defacto today.
And you think that we need BCD... why exactly ? There is Base-10000... no need for slow BCD :)