3 ms·

> You end up with secretaries doing the equivalent of a simple SQL "JOIN" by hand. Before Excel, they wouldn't be doing it all. Baby steps. Spreadsheets as a

> You end up with secretaries doing the equivalent of a simple SQL "JOIN" by hand. Before Excel, they wouldn't be doing it all. Baby steps. Spreadsheets as a paradigm is HUGELY successful at allowing normal people to do number crunching—number crunching that pre-spreadsheets would have required a programmer, and most likely, would never have been done at all. I think that's a win, even though we can (and hopefully will) go beyond that over time.

VLM 13y ago
Sure they did. That was my point, in '96 the master customer list was a word processing file. They use a spreadsheet now because mere mortals can't figure out columns in Word.
- erichocean 13y ago
  Ah, I misunderstood.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
> Before Excel, they wouldn't be doing it all. Baby steps. ... Spreadsheets as a paradigm is HUGELY successful at allowing normal people to do number crunching Spreadsheets were a thing before they were put into computers, you know... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet > The word "spreadsheet" came from "spread" in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item (text and/or graphics) that covers two facing pages, extending across the center fold and treating the two pages as one large one. The compound word "spread-sheet" came to mean the format used to present book-keeping ledgers—with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect—which were, traditionally, a "spread" across facing pages of a bound ledger (book for keeping accounting records) or on oversized sheets of paper (termed "analysis paper") ruled into rows and columns in that format and approximately twice as wide as ordinary paper. Spreadsheet applications made book keeping jobs much easier, to the point that book keeping (not programmer) is on the outs as a speciality job.

VLM 13y ago

Sure they did. That was my point, in '96 the master customer list was a word processing file. They use a spreadsheet now because mere mortals can't figure out columns in Word.

erichocean 13y ago
Ah, I misunderstood.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

> Before Excel, they wouldn't be doing it all. Baby steps. ... Spreadsheets as a paradigm is HUGELY successful at allowing normal people to do number crunching Spreadsheets were a thing before they were put into computers, you know... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet > The word "spreadsheet" came from "spread" in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item (text and/or graphics) that covers two facing pages, extending across the center fold and treating the two pages as one large one. The compound word "spread-sheet" came to mean the format used to present book-keeping ledgers—with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect—which were, traditionally, a "spread" across facing pages of a bound ledger (book for keeping accounting records) or on oversized sheets of paper (termed "analysis paper") ruled into rows and columns in that format and approximately twice as wide as ordinary paper. Spreadsheet applications made book keeping jobs much easier, to the point that book keeping (not programmer) is on the outs as a speciality job.