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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
Lotus 1-2-3 was pretty cool, and Excel excels at novel ways to silently corrupt my data. :-(
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 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.
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
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?
The original Microsoft Access team used an Access database to coordinate a celebration of their most recent anniversary. Unfortunately two people tried to save changes simultaneously, the file got corrupted and the entire team hasn't been heard from since.
#DeleteChrome
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...
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.
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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.)
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.
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.