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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.
I love Excel
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.
It's been the convention to mark an arithmetic expression with = since Visicalc. Visicalc is older than many Slashdotters.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
Got no interest in it. Spreadsheets are something that a user would use.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
And THIS is the problem with spreadsheets, people are using them for columnar text formatting, for lists and the like, and NOT calculations.
Uh, spreadsheets aren't just for calculations, and they never have been. They're for any kind of data storage or manipulation which could benefit from organization into columns and rows. That includes things like lists of records with text fields (like names) that might benefit from data manipulation (like sorting alphabetically or whatever).
In case you don't realize this, spreadsheets derive from accounting ledgers, which similarly held RECORDS. Calculations was one thing they could be used for, such as keeping a running tab on an account balance or whatever. But they also often were a place to consolidate various information, such as invoice lists of names, addresses, other customer data, etc.
Keeping a list of attendees for a party seems like a fine usage for a spreadsheet. Sure, a dedicated calendar app might have more specific functionality, but only if you want those functions. If all is needed is a place to store data in an organized fashion, why NOT a spreadsheet?
(And before you start complaining about how modern Excel is a bloated piece of crap, I'll happily agree with you -- but the ability to format text and column cells is important even if you want to do the most basic reporting with data involving calculations. So, you can hardly dispense with most of that and still end up with an application that anyone would want to use. People adopted spreadsheets because they could store data conveniently in a useful format -- if all they wanted was calculations, they could have just used a calculator or adding machine.)