5 ms·

The sad thing is how little it improved 1992-2022 (well 1998-2022 to be fair).

by cm2187 4y ago

dan-robertson 4y ago
I suspect it’s more that the features you would use haven’t changed much.
open-source-ux 4y ago
The sad thing is how little it improved Lotus tried to re-think spreadsheets with a product called Improv - it was full of good ideas but the product never took off. The product launched on NeXTSTEP in 1991 and then on Windows in 1993. Here's a 1990 sales video (low-resolution) from Lotus explaining how it works, and how it differs from traditional spreadsheets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M
- jmdeschamps 4y ago
  Have had the chance of working 18 month with NeXT computer - best (spirit) of machine ever... Improv was outstanding, but too much so... people couldn't easily adapt their spreadsheet work to the new tools (and on NeXT, in a time when green screen PCs here trying to adopt Windows 3.11 ;-) ) - seen quite a few applications never used to their potential benefits (and just wither away, replaced by less capable partial imitations)
blihp 4y ago
It actually improved quite a bit until Excel 97. By then the competition was dead, so they no longer needed to try.
- lvl102 4y ago
  Everything after the ribbon was garbage. They changed it, for worse, to sell new copies.
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    gotta say I like the search thingy they put in there where you can just type what you want instead of digging through menus, especially for lesser used features.
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      Basically the idea of a command palette, although less prominent, I guess. And yes, it's the way to actually use the office suite in general instead of messing around with the ribbon.
  - ziml77 4y ago
    I can't agree with this when they've so recently added XLOOKUP https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-b7fd680e-6d10-43e6-84f9-88eae8bf5929 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-...
    - samplatt 4y ago
      Unless that was sarcasm and I'm whooshing, I really don't get the big deal about xlookup. It's like vlookup but I'm no longer forced to have the lookup column as the first column in the range? I mean, that's nice, it makes my workflows one or steps shorter, but it's hardly groundbreaking.
      - eisa01 4y ago
        What happens if you insert a column in the table you’re VLOKKUPING? It breaks :)
      - ziml77 4y ago
        Mildly sarcastic. But it's much more sane than VLOOKUP which makes it feel like a big feature to people like me who always hated VLOOKUP.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    There have been a fair few changes that make a large difference if you care about that thing, but nothing earth shattering for all. Being able too define an arbitrary number of dynamic forgetting rules (where there was a fairly strict limit previously) is one change that I really appreciate. I'm sure there are many other such changes that appeal to other people's user of the thing.
layer8 4y ago
The latest additions (LAMBDA, XLOOKUP, dynamic arrays, etc.) are kind of a game changer. Also tables and conditional formatting, which I believe were introduced after 1997.
- cm2187 4y ago
  I never found tables useful. Now compare that to the evolution of the visual studio feature set over the same period.
jodrellblank 4y ago
It quietly became a thing you could open a spreadsheet from a network share, and so could someone else, and both live-edit it in realtime with markers for where each other is. Not just two people, either. Then gained that with SharePoint cloud backing which means the people don't need to be on the same LAN. And gained a web version which can be scripted in JavaScript instead of Visual Basic for Applications, and so desktop and web users can open, view, edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. With the Microsoft365 backing, someone can @ you in an Excel cell and M365 will email you about it to alert you. Spreadsheets are accessible from the MS Graph API and with a REST interface[1] which means they can be generated and updated from code while on M365, it means Excel can be used as a backend calculation engine in a supported way now (instead of running it headless on a server in an unsupported way), and spreadsheets integrate with PowerAutomate[2]. As I've said several times on HN, Microsoft has quietly made Office Cloud a company wide multiplayer gameworld thing, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed this new category appearing. It's not "store your files in the cloud" or "spreadsheets in a browser", it's something much more deeply integrated. If you thought it was hard to get away from Microsoft Office before because someone might send you a spreadsheet with weird formatting, this is the kind of moat/lockin which will carry Microsoft another decade and over Chromebooks and Android and macOS and Linux desktops. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/power-your-apps-with-the-new-excel-rest-api/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/power-your-ap... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/actions-reference/excel https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flow...
- tomcam 4y ago
  That is a fantastically perceptive and compact analysis. Do you have a blog or anything? Tried to stalk your username I think maybe you’re using it might be a play on a Doctor Who actor or something.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    Thank you; I don't have a blog, just use HN and Reddit as sinks for opinions. My username is a wordplay on a radio telescope near Manchester, England, which I visited a few times as a kid when they had science exhibits on the grounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory

The sad thing is how little it improved 1992-2022 (well 1998-2022 to be fair).

by cm2187 4y ago

The sad thing is how little it improved 1992-2022 (well 1998-2022 to be fair).

dan-robertson 4y ago

I suspect it’s more that the features you would use haven’t changed much.

open-source-ux 4y ago

The sad thing is how little it improved Lotus tried to re-think spreadsheets with a product called Improv - it was full of good ideas but the product never took off. The product launched on NeXTSTEP in 1991 and then on Windows in 1993. Here's a 1990 sales video (low-resolution) from Lotus explaining how it works, and how it differs from traditional spreadsheets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

jmdeschamps 4y ago
Have had the chance of working 18 month with NeXT computer - best (spirit) of machine ever... Improv was outstanding, but too much so... people couldn't easily adapt their spreadsheet work to the new tools (and on NeXT, in a time when green screen PCs here trying to adopt Windows 3.11 ;-) ) - seen quite a few applications never used to their potential benefits (and just wither away, replaced by less capable partial imitations)

blihp 4y ago

It actually improved quite a bit until Excel 97. By then the competition was dead, so they no longer needed to try.

lvl102 4y ago
Everything after the ribbon was garbage. They changed it, for worse, to sell new copies.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  gotta say I like the search thingy they put in there where you can just type what you want instead of digging through menus, especially for lesser used features.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    Basically the idea of a command palette, although less prominent, I guess. And yes, it's the way to actually use the office suite in general instead of messing around with the ribbon.
- ziml77 4y ago
  I can't agree with this when they've so recently added XLOOKUP https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-b7fd680e-6d10-43e6-84f9-88eae8bf5929 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-...
  - samplatt 4y ago
    Unless that was sarcasm and I'm whooshing, I really don't get the big deal about xlookup. It's like vlookup but I'm no longer forced to have the lookup column as the first column in the range? I mean, that's nice, it makes my workflows one or steps shorter, but it's hardly groundbreaking.
    - eisa01 4y ago
      What happens if you insert a column in the table you’re VLOKKUPING? It breaks :)
    - ziml77 4y ago
      Mildly sarcastic. But it's much more sane than VLOOKUP which makes it feel like a big feature to people like me who always hated VLOOKUP.
- dspillett 4y ago
  There have been a fair few changes that make a large difference if you care about that thing, but nothing earth shattering for all. Being able too define an arbitrary number of dynamic forgetting rules (where there was a fairly strict limit previously) is one change that I really appreciate. I'm sure there are many other such changes that appeal to other people's user of the thing.

layer8 4y ago

The latest additions (LAMBDA, XLOOKUP, dynamic arrays, etc.) are kind of a game changer. Also tables and conditional formatting, which I believe were introduced after 1997.

cm2187 4y ago
I never found tables useful. Now compare that to the evolution of the visual studio feature set over the same period.

jodrellblank 4y ago

It quietly became a thing you could open a spreadsheet from a network share, and so could someone else, and both live-edit it in realtime with markers for where each other is. Not just two people, either. Then gained that with SharePoint cloud backing which means the people don't need to be on the same LAN. And gained a web version which can be scripted in JavaScript instead of Visual Basic for Applications, and so desktop and web users can open, view, edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. With the Microsoft365 backing, someone can @ you in an Excel cell and M365 will email you about it to alert you. Spreadsheets are accessible from the MS Graph API and with a REST interface[1] which means they can be generated and updated from code while on M365, it means Excel can be used as a backend calculation engine in a supported way now (instead of running it headless on a server in an unsupported way), and spreadsheets integrate with PowerAutomate[2]. As I've said several times on HN, Microsoft has quietly made Office Cloud a company wide multiplayer gameworld thing, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed this new category appearing. It's not "store your files in the cloud" or "spreadsheets in a browser", it's something much more deeply integrated. If you thought it was hard to get away from Microsoft Office before because someone might send you a spreadsheet with weird formatting, this is the kind of moat/lockin which will carry Microsoft another decade and over Chromebooks and Android and macOS and Linux desktops. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/power-your-apps-with-the-new-excel-rest-api/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/power-your-ap... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/actions-reference/excel https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flow...

tomcam 4y ago
That is a fantastically perceptive and compact analysis. Do you have a blog or anything? Tried to stalk your username I think maybe you’re using it might be a play on a Doctor Who actor or something.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Thank you; I don't have a blog, just use HN and Reddit as sinks for opinions. My username is a wordplay on a radio telescope near Manchester, England, which I visited a few times as a kid when they had science exhibits on the grounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory