The Spreadsheet at 25: 25 Amazing Excel Examples that Evolved from the Invention that Changed the World
128
The Spreadsheet at 25: 25 Amazing Excel Examples that Evolved from the Invention that Changed the World
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781615473243 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holy Macro! Books |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Spreadsheet at 25
25 Amazing Excel Examples the Evolved from the Invention that Changed the World!
By Bill Jelen
Holy Macro! Books
Copyright © 2005 Bill JelenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932802-52-8
CHAPTER 1
THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD!
19th Century
Using rows and columns for accounting can be traced back to August DeMorgan, a London mathematician in an 1846 book entitled Main Principle of Bookkeeping.
1964
A Berkley professor, Richard Mattessich, realized that performing budgetary what-if analyses by hand was not productive. It could take a week to recalculate an entire budget, by which time the original assumptions would be obsolete.
In two books published in 1964, Mattessich proposed electronic spreadsheets for solving such problems. His Simulation of the Firm through a Budget Computer Program detailed a program that would allow rapid recalculation of a company budget. His book included the Fortran programming code to allow any firm with a mainframe computer to eliminate the mechanical pencils for the specific application of budgeting. Rather than being a general-purpose program like VisiCalc, Mattessich's approach required a knowledge of the Fortran language.
Mattessich was clearly on the right track in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the computer hardware of the time was expensive and not readily available to the masses. Companies typically used teletype terminals to dial into a time-sharing mainframe, where charges were accrued by the minute. It was the right idea, but it would take fifteen years before sufficient computing power was available at a low enough price for most companies.
1976
In the 1970's, personal computers were in their infancy. Byte magazine claimed to have 73,000 subscribers in 1976; people running computers like the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. Peter Jennings wrote MicroChess and sold the first copy in December 1976. It was one of the first computer games and eventually sold millions of copies. However, unless you were a hard-core chess fan, you probably were not going to pay $1000 to $2000 for a computer for the sole purpose of playing MicroChess.
For the average accountant, in 1978 a "spreadsheet" was still a large piece of green ledger paper with number figures written in with a mechanical pencil. Any accountant at the time kept a large eraser nearby because when you discovered that one number was wrong, all of the subsequent rows had to be recalculated.
1978
In 1978, at MIT, a graduate student named Dan Bricklin had a vision. What if you combined a fighter-pilot heads-up display and put a trackball on the bottom of a calculator? You would be able to roll the calculator backward to any previous entry, change the number, and all future calculations would change. It was a practical invention; Bricklin was constantly doing case study analyses using only a calculator.
Bricklin teamed up with Bob Frankston. Working in a Cambridge attic during 1978 and 1979, Frankston brought Bricklin's invention to life.
The heads-up display was replaced with an Apple ][ monitor. The trackball on the calculator was replaced by the two arrow keys on the Apple ][ keyboard.
It was quite a challenge for Frankston to fit the software into the 24K available on the Apple ][.
Also in 1978, Peter Jennings of Microchess fame met Dan Fylstra of Personal Software. Fylstra was a programmer, Harvard MBA student, and a writer for Byte Magazine. They joined forces, and Microchess became the signature product for the young company. Fylstra had heard of Bricklin's software and realized that adding the new software to the Personal Software product line would be important. Fylstra negotiated with Bricklin and Frankston to add the spreadsheet product to the Personal Software product line. Personal Software used profits from MicroChess to help offset the $4,000 monthly cost of the timeshare computer being used for development.
1979
In early 1979, the spreadsheet product was working well enough for Bricklin to use it in a case study to calculate numerous what-if scenarios. At least two people-Frankston and Beta Tester Peter Jenning from Personal Software-used the product to calculate their tax return before April 15, 1979. It was that first tax return that caused Frankston to add the Lookup() function-for tax rates!
During the spring of 1979, Bricklin and Frankston had dubbed their visible calculator with the name VisiCalc. They had a booth at the May 1979 West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco. They demonstrated VisiCalc to big names like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Adam Osborne, and others.
Morgan Stanley securities analyst Ben Rosen saw the product and immediately realized the implications. In 1979, he wrote that VisiCalc might be the software tail that wagged the computer industry dog. Rosen was right.
Visicalc debuted October 17, 1979. For a $99.00 list price, buyers received a brown leatherette folder with a 5¼" diskette, a glossy manual, and a quick reference card. Businesses everywhere jumped on board.
Visicalc sold 1,293 units in the the month of October and 4,258 total units in 1979. All told, over 400,000 copies of VisiCalc were shipped through 1982. Remember, for every sale of a $99 copy of Visicalc, someone was likely spending $2,000 on a personal computer. As Rosen predicted, the invention of VisiCalc did spur the entire personal computer industry. So, the next time you sit down at your PC, give a tip o' the cap to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for starting it all.
1982
Microsoft Multiplan
In 1982, the first IBM PCs shipped. Microsoft had developed much of the software, including the operating system and application software. In a 1982 interview with PC Magazine, Bill Gates touted the benefits of his soon-to-be- released second-generation software product.
Gates touted the fact that you could have named ranges and didn't have to think in terms of "A10", "B9" and "C14". He also was proud of the first ability to link spreadsheets. Numbers from the Sales spreadsheet and Cost spreadsheet could now be carried forward to the Summary spreadsheet. Of course, these were still sheets in different files, using external link formulas.
Lotus 1-2-3
Mitch Kapor was an MBA student at MIT. Bricklin introduced him to Dan Fylstra, who coaxed Kapor to move to the west coast to become project manager for VisiCalc. Kapor developed the VisiPlot and VisiTrend add-ins for VisiCalc. Personal Software was renamed as VisiCorp. Although VisiCorp bought VisiPlot and VisiTrend from Mitch Kapor for millions of dollars, Kapor did not like the culture at VisiCorp. He left the company in 1981 and headed back to the east coast.
Mitch Kapor realized there was more opportunity for the spreadsheet. He formed Micro Finance Systems in 1982 in his basement and hired a few programmers. Funded with money from the sale of VisiPlot to VisiCorp, Kapor's team began working on a better spreadsheet. One of the programmers was Jonathan Sachs. Working for almost a year in Assembler, Sachs programmed a spreadsheet designed for the new IBM PC. Sachs remembers that Lotus 1-2-3 was tuned to use almost all of the features of the IBM platform. This was certainly a key decision that helped ensure the success of both Lotus and the IBM PC platform.
It took ten months to develop Lotus 1-2-3. At every stage, Kapor would add more features, making Lotus 1-2-3 run circles around every other spreadsheet, including VisiCalc. The name "1-2-3" indicated that there were three main features to Lotus-a spreadsheet, business graphics, and a database. At the November 1982 Comdex in Las Vegas, they demonstrated a pre-release version of Lotus 1-2-3. Already riding the buzz of an article in the Wall Street Journal, the pair booked $3 million of orders for Lotus 1-2-3 during Comdex. Lotus 1-2-3 was released on January 26, 1983 and shipped 60,000 units in the first month f availability.
Spreadsheets for Everything
Unlike the budget models described by Mattessich in 1964, electronic spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus allowed for non-programmers to build models to track budgets plus hundreds of other uses. The applications were limited only by imagination. In the early 1980s TAB Books published a best-selling volume by Ted Lewis called "32 VisiCalc Spreadsheets". Ted spelled out plans for using VisiCalc around the home and the office. His examples included a Tic-Tac-Toe game, a bowling scorekeeper, and more.
On the next page are Ted's recollections of the book.
On the Origins of the Species
I was fortunate to be around when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were inventing Visicalc the first spreadsheet. It was in the late 1970s and the Apple II was all the rage. VisiCalc was the first "killer app" for personal computers, because it sold Apple II computers and made Apple the king of "mind appliances" a name that Apple once thought it would give its secret weapon the Macintosh.
When the IBM PC launched in 1981, it had to have software or it wouldn't be able to compete with the Apple II. Mitch Kapor, who jumped on the opportunity with Lotus 1-2-3, exploited this obvious business opportunity. Lotus 1-2-3 was a second-generation spreadsheet program that propelled the IBM PC to dominance. Once again, a spreadsheet is what sold personal computers and fueled the industry.
This pattern has repeated itself several times. Microsoft entered the spreadsheet business with Excel in 1984 to sell Macintoshes! And when Windows finally appeared on the IBM-compatible PC, Excel became the primary reason people bought the PC. Excel advanced spreadsheet technology by incorporating graphical user interface technology-primarily borrowed from the Macintosh-into spreadsheets. Now everyone could use one.
Like everyone else back in the 'good old days', I wanted to sell information that PC users found useful and intriguing. So one week in the summer of 1983 I compiled a list of spreadsheets that I thought were novel, useful, or just plain clever, and dilithium Press bound them into a book, "32 Visicalc Spreadsheets". It was perhaps the first published collection of spreadsheets for PCs.
Looking back today, some of my 32 spreadsheets were rather ambitious. One called ECON was a macroeconomic model of the national economy! But most were trivial by today's standards: how to count calories, keep tenant records for an apartment house, and a checkbook balancer. Spreadsheet number 2 was Tic-Tac-Toe, which has been brought back to life in this book.
I used my IBM PC and Apple II to develop them, but I had also seen a preview of the Macintosh. Since I wanted them to run on everything-IBM PC, Apple II, and the fancy new Macintosh, I thought the best way to publish them was to include a diskette containing the spreadsheets in the DIF format. This way, they would be transportable across all platforms-or so I thought. Today, nobody uses DIF! But millions of people still use a spreadsheet program of some sort. Visicalc-in its many modern forms-still lives!
Ted G. Lewis
2004
Here is Ted's version of Tic-Tac-Toe, circa 1983.
Below is the image of a modern-day Excel tic-tac-toe. VBA is used to model a 4-dimensional tic-tac-toe board and the computer plays a pretty mean game. This workbook, programmed by Timmy Chan is available at http://www.mrexcel.com/pc10.php.
The Dominance of Lotus 1-2-3
When Lotus 1-2-3 was released in January 1983, it had a $495 list price, nearly double that of VisiCalc. By October 1983, PC World was reporting that sales of Lotus were outpacing VisiCalc. This would begin Lotus's ten-year dominance of the spreadsheet industry.
By 1985, things were falling apart at VisiCorp. A lawsuit and counterlawsuit were filed between VisiCorp and Bricklin. The company was eventually sold to Lotus in that year. Any remaining owners of Visicalc were offered a reduced- price upgrade to Lotus 1-2-3.
Over the years, there were competitors to Lotus 1-2-3, but none were able to overcome Lotus's domination of the industry. You might have worked with products such as Supercalc, As Easy As, SynCalc, EasyPlanner, PFS Plan, The Twin, Javelin or Appleworks.
Excel for the Macintosh
Microsoft debuted a new spreadsheet for the Macintosh in 1985 and called it Excel. For two years, Microsoft sold Excel at $495 and continued to sell Multiplan for DOS for $195. Excel gave Microsoft the expertise in designing a graphical-based spreadsheet. The Macintosh was not popular outside of academia and designer circles, so this "upstart" Excel product did not seem to be much of a threat to Lotus.
From 1984 through 1987, Lotus enjoyed absolute dominance in the market.
I was convinced that Lotus 1-2-3 would control the spreadsheet market forever and always. There was nothing that anyone could do to upset that dominance.
In 1987, Borland released their spreadsheet called Quattro Pro. This would be one of the players to challenge Lotus 1-2-3. Also in 1987, Microsoft produced an Excel verion 2.0 for the Windows operating system and discontinued Multiplan. Now-in 1987, no one actually owned Windows. The earliest versions of this package shipped with a version of Windows 1.0. In order to switch from Word Processing to Spreadsheets, you would have to load up Windows, start Excel, then later shutdown Windows to go back to your DOS word processor.
None of the other companies had experience with graphic-based spreadsheets. In magazine reviews, on all issues except speed, Excel for Windows was highly reviewed. The hardware of the day made the software too sluggish to compete with the speed of Lotus or Quattro. This was quite a gamble for Microsoft. Neither Lotus nor Quattro would release a spreadsheet for Windows until after Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. This basically gave Microsoft a five-year head start on graphical spreadsheets.
In 1989, an add-in for Lotus 1-2-3 called Allways debuted and allowed you to nicely format your printed worksheets. It was a great example of WYSIWYG (what you see if what you get) long before Windows was generally available and stable.
Lotus Improv
In 1986, Pito Salas joined the Advanced Technology Group at Lotus to think about a totally new kind of spreadsheet. Pito invented a multi-dimensional spreadsheet product with natural language formulas and dynamic views. Originally called Modeler, then BackBay, the product was released for the NeXT brand computers in 1989 as Improv.
Improv was unlike any other spreadsheet. You could do lightning-fast summary analyses simply by dragging field labels around the spreadsheet. It was amazing! Lotus chose NOT to include this functionality in their flagship Lotus 1-2- 3 product. Instead, Lotus Improv for Windows came out in 1991. If you were a heavy-duty data junkie, you likely ran out to buy Improv for $99 the moment that you saw it. Regular spreadsheet users, though, never got it.
Three-Way Race
From about 1989 up until 1993, the three leading spreadsheets were Lotus, Quattro, and Excel. Any one of the three could be expected to win on best features in the press. Quattro Pro Release 1 in 1989 was generally considered better than Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3, yet Lotus was able to retain its marketshare.
Lotus and Quattro were slow to produce Windows spreadsheets. Lotus for Windows 1.0 in 1991 looked like a DOS program running in a window and was disappointing. Quattro for Windows didn't debut until 1992. Finally, in 1993, Lotus Release 4 for Windows and Quattro Pro Release 5 were viable Windows versions. However, by this time, Microsoft had released their Excel version 5 for Windows.
Lotus had been losing to Excel in the reviewer's eyes since 1989, but yet remained the dominant spreadsheet. One reviewer suggested that anyone new to spreadsheets should start with Excel. The main obstacle for the Lotus competitors was the learning curve to learn a new spreadsheet. When Lotus was introduced in 1983, they were able to catch the wave of new spreadsheet users. By 1989, the uphill battle was convincing current Lotus users to give up their now well-known interface and learn something new.
Excel Pulls Ahead
1993 finally became the tipping point. In 1993, Excel shipped more units than Lotus. In 1993, Excel had about a 45% share of new spreadsheets shipped, Lotus had 35% and Quattro had about 20%. Lotus has never regained ground.
Lotus release 5 in 1994 was answered with Excel 95 in 1995. Lotus slipped to a 20% share and Excel grew to a 70% share. During these years, Excel added tremendous new features to their product.
Excel 5 offered multiple worksheets in a workbook. This feature had been available in Lotus since 1989. Both Lotus 4 and Excel 5 added the ability to edit directly in the cells instead of in the formula bar. The killer, though? Excel 5 bundled all of the cool functionality of Lotus Improv in a feature that they called Pivot Tables. Today, Pivot Tables remain Excel's most powerful feature. The VBA programming language also debuted in this version.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Spreadsheet at 25 by Bill Jelen. Copyright © 2005 Bill Jelen. Excerpted by permission of Holy Macro! Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
CHAPTER - 1 - THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD!,
CHAPTER - 2 - 25 WONDERS OF THE SPREADHEET WORLD,
CHAPTER - 3 - COOL THINGS PEOPLE DO WITH EXCELCOOL USES,
CHAPTER - 4 - 25 COOL THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH EXCEL COOL DOWNLOADS,
CHAPTER - 5 - VISIONARY! CREATIVE! REALLY SMART! CONTRIBUTORS,
AFTERWORD - WHERE ARE THEY NOW?,