Recalc Or Die: Excel 1.0 Developers Celebrate Their Baby's 30th Birthday 119
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.
Excel (Score:1)
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.
Visicalc was world-changing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Lotus 1-2-3 was pretty cool, and Excel excels at novel ways to silently corrupt my data. :-(
Re:Visicalc was world-changing... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. Don't ever let Excel touch your csv files. For example, if you open a csv file with Excel and then save it again, it will have converted cells containing (large) numeric IDs to scientific notation. Without asking. Bye, data.
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There is a simple workaround for this - rename the file from .csv to .csx
When you open it, Excel will start with the file import wizard where you can tell it to delimit with commas and finally import your 45-character zero-padded serial numbers as text.
Now the import wizard could certainly use some work. I think it's the same now as it was in Office 2000!
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Re:Visicalc was world-changing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. Don't ever let Excel touch your csv files. For example, if you open a csv file with Excel and then save it again, it will have converted cells containing (large) numeric IDs to scientific notation. Without asking. Bye, data.
Converting "JAN10" and "MAR10" to dates was also pretty creative, changing like 5 entries in a list of many thousand codes. Silent, subtle data corruption is so fun. At least with the scientific notation it's pretty obvious your data has been fucked.
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Excel also likes to helpfully convert a telephone number to a date...sigh.
Re:Visicalc was world-changing... (Score:4, Funny)
I also failed when I tried to convert phone numbers into dates. Rejection sucks.
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You're upset that Excel treats something that looks like a number as a number instead of reading your mind.
Put your serial numbers (which aren't really numbers, they are strings containing only digits) in quotes.
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It actually was a csv file with all fields surrounded by quotes. Even the numbers. That said, the contents of that file were not provided by myself but by a third party, and the file was apparently opened in Excel by my employer's customers, who were supposed to let our software read the file.
Programming for the masses (Score:2)
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 progr
A spreadsheet for an RSVP list? (Score:2, Funny)
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
Re:A spreadsheet for an RSVP list? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:A spreadsheet for an RSVP list? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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I was at one of the early Office launches, 1997 or so (not for fun, I was an MS conference tech). One of the things that lodged in my head was the presentation from the Excel project lead and the implied competition between the Office apps. He said he had heard about all the great advances Word had made for text formatting and presentation for this release, and he exclaimed that "we have Word's functionality inside each and every cell!"
So no, even from the earliest, and as far as MS was concerned, spreads
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sorry man, accounting ledgers are double entry, spreadsheets are not. they are planning tools, not accounting tools at heart
What the heck are you talking about? Your post shows a great ignorance of classical accounting, as well as spreadsheets (which, by the way, historically ARE derived from accounting books [wikipedia.org], despite what you may think).
Anyhow, a few other points to note:
-- Old-school paper double-entry accounting often uses plenty of single-entry books as well, often known as journals or daybooks (though informally they are often called "ledgers" too). They are essential bookkeeping records as well.
-- It's a trivial ex
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Spreadsheets are one of my favourite tools. To me, no matter whether it was SC, or 1-2-3, or Excel, or LibreCalc, a spreadsheet is a "rubbery grid", which I mostly use for calculating things, but also for formatting things in blocks, and even making things like logos and graphics. My 1st business cards were made in Lotus 1-2-3 with Allways. I recently rebuilt all the logos for my website in LibreCalc.
It's not the machine - it's the machinist.
Re: Excel still assumes you're entering text... (Score:1)
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.
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Excel actually included a run-time version of windows at the time.
Re:Excel still assumes you're entering text... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been the convention to mark an arithmetic expression with = since Visicalc. Visicalc is older than many Slashdotters.
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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 t
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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"
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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.
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Because (Score:3)
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 wa
VBA Anonomys (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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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.
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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.
We certainly ripped some stuff off? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Screenshot for the curious (Score:1)
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2429/3635573389_7a34b231a2_o.jpg [flickr.com]
I could not find a DOS screenshot, but would welcome one)
It is remarkably similar looking today, 30 years later.
And still not better than Visicalc. (Score:2)
http://museum.syssrc.com/artif... [syssrc.com]
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spreadsheet calculator (sc) is still available!
Excel? (Score:2, Insightful)
MultiFinder had a workaround for Excel 1.x (Score:2)
MultiFinder had a workaround for Excel 1.x where it had to be loaded below the 1MB line.
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The problem was that Excel 1.0 was written using a bytecode virtual machine that for some really stupid reason used 8086-style segment/offset pointers referring to absolute host memory addresses... on a system with 32-bit registers and linear addressing space. It was a really big WTF.
I seem to also recall that either Excel 1.0 for Mac or Word 1.0 for Mac was the first to have the key shortcut Command-W = close window. Millions of people have been accidentally quitting apps when trying to close windows ever
Data analysis in Excel? (Score:1)
Ob (Score:2)
Better hope there are fewer than 65536 of them and nobody's name is longer than 256 characters.
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I love Excel
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I also love Excel
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Look, "this is news for nerds", not "hangout for freaks".
Go back where you came from!
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I love SAP.
Come on now. Lets no say things we can't take back afterwards.
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I love SAP.
Then, you sir, are a sap.....
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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.
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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...
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NeXTstations (Score:2)
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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.
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Why aren't you hiding the ribbon when you are not using it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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GF Arithmetic is Galois Field Arithmetic.
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( Disclaimer: I do know about GF Arithmetic. )
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Doing GF arithmetic is probably an effective way of repelling girlfriends.
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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.
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All computer numerical models are imprecise.
Accountants have a favorite model. It's full of its own errors (like rounding many intermediate results to only two digits of fractional precision), but these are the errors accountants are used to seeing, regardless of how large the errors are. So they go on and on about how "superior" their model is when other models come up with slightly different results, even if those results might sometimes be closer to the abstract ideal. Accountants are smug in their knowl
Re: Does Excel work yet? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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I'm from Kuwait, you insensitive clod!
Re: Does Excel work yet? (Score:2, Funny)
Actually, I calculate today to be Excel's 30.00000001th birthday.
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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.
Absolutely (Score:3)
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?
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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?
Yes.
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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?
Yes.
You should bottle your smug and sell it.
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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?
Yes.
You should bottle your smug and sell it.
So what you are saying is that the idea of using imprecise calculations is a good thing? AC is correct, it is the right hand of PowerPoint.
I do bottle my smug - it's an irresistable attractant to people like yourself. It's called "Yes".
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utterly inappropriate for anything demanding known precision.
That's why it works best with irrational numbers...
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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?
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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.
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"He yelled up the basement stairs,
in excitement:
MAAA!
I POSTED IT AGAIN!"
Re:Current version is just .... so..... slow.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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 n