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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
Lotus 1-2-3 was pretty cool, and Excel excels at novel ways to silently corrupt my data. :-(
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.
I remember in about 1988 when Excel was released for Windows that they said that was going to be fixed. I guess they realized most people use it as a word processor rather than as a spreadsheet. I know the vast majority of spreadsheets my organization creates doesn't contain any calculations.
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.
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.
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
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
Excel actually included a run-time version of windows at the time.
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?
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...
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.
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.
Excel still assumes you're entering text 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?
It's not the spreadsheet way, you put 123 in one cell, 456 in a second cell and the formula in a third. If you just want the answer you might as well use the calculator. Also it's definitively not interpreted as text, if you've ever exported codes with leading zeroes you'd know that. It's Excel's attempt at being automagic, personally I wish they'd just use the text as-is and had a magic wand icon to try auto-interpreting everything.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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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!”
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.
Well, nobody was staying on topic anyhow and we never do so...
It's just an observation and I may be mistaken. I never did see the results of the poll /. did to find out the user's ages, genders, etc... They should release that information. It would be a few years old by now. Anyhow, I think you may be mistaken? 31 years ago, 1984, would be right around the time that I am guessing many of us were born. I think the user age here is probably a bit higher than that, as an average, and would expect it to be in the 35 to 45 range as the average. Personally, I'm 57 and was born in '57. (I only get to say this for a year, allow me my trivial enjoyments.) You're obviously older than some others and will help to change the average. I also know that there are a number of others who are older than myself from a number of conversations here.
That said, I'd really have liked to seen the results of their survey. I don't recall them releasing it and I paid attention for a while afterwards. I must, also, confess that I did not submit my information to said survey. I am far too lazy for that. I am not certain but it seems that a number of us are pretty old compared to a number of other sites that I frequent.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
One way to prevent Excel from automagically guessing how it should treat the pasted data is to set the destination's cells format to "Text" before pasting (rather than the default "General"). Then, after pasting the data, some manual formatting is necessary, but at least you won't get unwanted roundings, nonsensical string-to-date conversions, scientific notations, etc.
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.
And... a minor clarification:
One way to prevent Excel from automagically guessing how it should treat the pasted data is to set the destination's cells format to "Text" before pasting (rather than the default "General")
...and paste using the "match destination formatting" option.
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."
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"
I don't know about that - perhaps a cell I need to do a quick one-off calculation just because of the way the data is presented.
Of course, I know how to use spreadsheets, so 123+456 means I enter "=123+456" to turn it into a formula and have the spreadsheet do the calculation for me.
I came to this when I needed to do one-off calculations in a cell of two constants - basically the total amount of money, minus ONE of the two taxes paid on it. I needed to calculate it, and I could whip out the calculator, but it seemed stupid to do so when I was already using what was a pretty powerful calculator already. The rest of it was a spreadsheet so it made sense to not whip out the OS calculator and do my calculation, then copy the result into the spreadsheet, but just have the spreadsheet do it for me. It was already calculating other stuff anyhow.
Anyhow, I suppose Excel was probably better on Mac - to get around the 640K limit you had all sorts of tricks playing around with EMS in DOS. After all, the LIM team to get around the 640k limit was composed of engineers from Lotus, Intel and Microsoft. Once Windows happened with flat memory, such nasty hacks could be eliminated.
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.
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."
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
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
Doing GF arithmetic is probably an effective way of repelling girlfriends.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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
It's been the convention to mark an arithmetic expression with = since Visicalc. Visicalc is older than many Slashdotters.
Exactly, it's a piece of software not a magical mind reader. People on here keep complaining about Excel not saving long numbers properly, but that's because you need to tell it you want "123456789012345678901234567890.6666666" to be text and not a number (by putting it in quotation marks) Spreadsheets will assume that something in numerical form is a number, just like they will assume +2+3 is a formula and calculate it as 5 unless you type "+2+3"
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it