Simply consider the swath of job titles that have emerged in business analytics, just like the one I spent the greater part of in. Entire companies are completely built off of the back of Excel. They love it. For some of the simpler solutions it provides, there are certainly parallels. Consider not only the number of explicit businesses that were built off of Excel, but also the sheer amount of business intelligence functioning off of the tooling. All the dashboards.
All the financial decisions. All the forecasting. If it was a decision between keeping Excel or, literally, every other app - would keep Excel pic. As much as I love the product have I told you that I love Excel?
If we go back to the invention of Excel 34 years ago , so much has changed in the way people communicate and work. And yet, Excel at its fundamentals has not. If not Microsoft, then who invented the spreadsheet? We have Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to thank for that. Dan was the first person to conceptualize the grid-like structure that continues to be the backbone of the modern spreadsheet. As a technology, the invention of the spreadsheet accelerated the entire PC industry.
Steve Jobs is credited as saying that VisiCalc, propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved more than any other single event. Around the same time, Microsoft had already launched its precursor to Excel called Multiplan code name: Electronic Paper , which unfortunately struggled to compete with the Lotus In fact, Jon DeVaan member of Excel 1. To get a sense of the era when Excel was created, consider that Microsoft revealed their mouse, the Microsoft Mouse , only two years prior in The spreadsheet—a simple, flexible, and incredibly powerful tool—quickly became the lingua franca of finance.
Spreadsheets are now loved and loathed in equal measure. Their flexibility is useful, but also dangerous. Spreadsheets have been at the center of billion-dollar trading scandals and misguided economic policy prescriptions , among many other snafus.
The commonly held wisdom, backed by research , is that nine out of 10 spreadsheets contain errors, a sobering thought considering how far and wide the files are used in business, government, and beyond. For Bricklin, the spreadsheet is history. Since software patents were rare when he created VisiCalc, rival spreadsheet programs like Lotus and Microsoft Excel quickly emerged and cornered the market. You can still download a working version of VisiCalc from , which weighs in at a scant 27 kilobytes.
Bricklin later developed highly regarded prototyping software, early blogging tools, and a note-taking app for tablets. Now, as chief technology officer for Alpha Software, he is helping companies build mobile apps, the next frontier in personal computing. He spoke with Quartz from Boston about his role in computing history, and his thoughts on what comes next.
The transcript of the interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Quartz: Do you ever step back and marvel at how ubiquitous the spreadsheet has become?
Before I did VisiCalc, I was also involved in the early days of screen-based word processing. That meant that computers would be everywhere. In those days, they were god-awful expensive. I came out of the word processing and typesetting worlds, where every keystroke counted. I was competing against the back of the envelope. If it took longer to input something on a spreadsheet, you would have done it by hand instead. So I tried to make it as simple as minimal as possible.
It was really important to make it easy to use. Lots of people were building software for financial forecasting using rows, columns, formulas, and all, but not put together the way the spreadsheet was, aimed for ease of use with a general-purpose, two-dimensional, word-processing-like layout. General-purpose tools have their advantages. They become widely used because you can use them for a wide range of tasks. You only have to learn the one tool. The first version of Excel was released in for Mac.
Later in November , the first Windows version was released. It was a relatively small program with few basic capabilities. It could only calculate data within a matrix of 5 columns by 20 rows. Frankston made the program fast and with better arithmetic. Trust the Excel Help experts.
From household names to mom-and-pop shops, we can help you improve your workflows with Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft solutions. Schedule a Free Consultation. Where do we go from here?
With the internet central to our lives and business, it makes sense that the needs of the many will prevail. As the Microsoft platforms continue to evolve, it becomes a full time job to stay up-to-date on the emerging technologies.
0コメント