That’s it. I was just wondering.
And also, what’s the weirdest stuff you’ve used a spreadsheet for?
For me, it was tracking my weekly and daily weights, and making graphs of the fluctuation.
Well, it did allow for better analysis, but prior to spreadsheets, people did balance sheets. Some were simlar to spreadsheets except that you had to do all the calculations yourself.
Spreadsheets are one of the few basic types of applications that don’t have a direct real-world counterpart. They can be used for just about everything. I have met people that used Excel for almost everything they do including a word processor. You can use them as a database, a light graphic design tool, programming environment and lots more.
The weirdest thing I have seen Excel used for is in my current job. We test systems by redesigning the whole system according to the original specs including user input screens and everything else in Excel. It is extremely difficult and I am one of the very few people in a mega-corp that can do it. So, you can use it as a system simulator as well.
Pencil, paper and an eraser.
Balance sheets! That will work. (I was working on some fiction, when in mid-stream, I decided it should be set in 1967. Hence, someone couldn’t casually finish up a spreadsheet.)
Pencil, paper and an eraser.
Heh. True, of course, but I wondered what the resultant piece of work would be called.
I am starting to use them more at my office job, even if just for entering data that I have to track, data which isn’t arithmatic or financial.
Absolutely. Early spreadsheets changed the way people worked…it’s not a case of ‘what they used’ before, but ‘what they did’.
It might bear mentioning that the heavy-duty work sometimes done on spreadsheets today was done, in 1967, on mainframe accounting applications.
Yeah, speaking of weird spreadsheet applications, the EPA put out a freakin’ simulator where you can spec out a vehicle, its speed over time, and you’ll get its emissions during the span of time you simulated. Kinda’ neat, but odd.
Actually, the term “spreadsheet” for the computer program was taken from the paper & pencil version, which looked & worked just like you’d expect.
Nobody but accountants, bookkeepers, & actuaries did them, so an ordinary citizen had probably never heard the term. But within those trades, a “spreadsheet” was a well known term for laying your data out in a rows & columns format & performing calculations.
Special tablets of pre-printed paper were sold with a couple columns on the left for text & 2 to 14+ columns designed for money values extending to the right. Here are a few modern examples: http://www.rapidsupplies.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=52707
Your challenge in your book is that if you use the term “spreadsheet” you’ll be historically accurate, but your 2006 audience will misinterpret the reference.
Accounting paper (pencil required).
That’s what Lotus 123 was based on.
Lay out your rows and columns, do your addition and make sure everything balances. Find a bookkeeping (basic accounting) book from before the time that the PC’s became common. It will show you why Lotus 123 instantly became such a useful tool.
Bookkeeping was a class in high school that had some very practical applications.
Lotus 123 was revolutionary. Excel was an inferior immitation that only made it into the market via the marketing power of Microsoft.
OTOH, a few people think VisiCalc was revolutionary.
Green ledger paper, pencils of various colors, lots of erasers.
As stated above, used primarily for accounting & bookkeeping functions. Lucky me, I got into accounting just as Lotus 123 was starting to get popular in the '80’s. Lotus and a few intergrated accounting software packages like Peachtree completely changed accounting. I only wish colleges would spend some time teaching them. The number of freshly-minted baby accountants I’ve had to re-train for the real world…
I’ve heard of Visicalc but I never used it. Therefore, the questions are:
Was Lotus 123 superior to Visicalc at the time it was introduced?
Could Visicalc be used on the IBM PC, which was the machine that revolutionized office computing?
When Excel was introduced it was vastly inferior to Lotus 123. It was like Yugo running Lexus out of business. Also, in the same sense, Word was vastly inferior to Wordperfect.
I can still remember having to enter printer setup strings for Lotus 123. You get bonus points if you know what a setup string is.
A balance sheet is still a term of specific and specialized use in the accounting profession. Accounts must still “balance” in the sense that “debits” must equal “credits” and “assets” must still equal “liabilities plus equity.”
Spreadsheets were (and are) used as workpapers to produce the financial statements, which included the ledgers, balance sheets and income statements.
In my desk drawer, I have, a pad of green ledger paper. WilsonJones ColumnWrite Columnar Pad #G7504. I’ll bet it’s over 30 years old (I’m 26). I just kinda inherited it when I took over this job many years ago. I’ve never used it for anything really. I did this job for about two weeks and said the hell with it and moved everything over to the computer. No more messy handwriting, no more math errors etc…
edit. There’s a mark that says “© 5 87 (J5620)” From that I’m gonna go ahead and guess it’s from 1987.
I had a fantastic spreadsheet set up for my grades, all through college.
See, if this test is worth 15% of my lab mark for this class, and the lab part is worth 45% of the total course mark, and the course is worth 3 credits…
I’d tally up my marks as I went, seeing how each individual quiz added to my final grade and overall GPA. The best part was that usually, by finals, I’d already accumulated enough points to pass the courses, and so I didn’t have to stress about the final exams. (I did stress anyway, but that’s besides the point) 
I will add that the power of the computerized spreadsheet was such that it got adapted and used in ways it wasn’t intended or really appropriate.
Spreadsheet software was so good and easy to learn that it was adapted for purposes that were better suited for data base and word processing. People learned Lotus 123 and started creating data bases on it. They started to do their word processing on it. Data base software was much more difficult to learn but much more useful for many purposes.
Does anyone remember DB2? What a PITA!
Gaaahhhh! Flashbacks!
Thanks a lot, 'dog.
:smack:
In addition to all the answers about financial stuff, there were also many specialized engineering forms available commercially.
For example, you could buy surveyers notebooks that had columns for entering all the essential surveying data. If a particular engineering task was a common one there was probably a standard form that you could buy for it. And companies produced forms for their own specialized tasks.
The spreadsheet just made it simple to make you own form on the spot plus do all the computations that used to be done by slide ruie, semi-log and log-log paper, electrical reactance paper and so on and so on.
It’s worth noting that something similar to spreadsheets is still used for various purposes. During the one semester in college where I was an Engineering student, I had a pad of quarter-inch graphing paper, which was basically a legal pad with quarter-inch-squared gridlines drawn on it. You could use it for working out math problems (with each digit going in a box) or as ruled paper (ignoring vertical lines) for writing things down during labwork. When I was in high school, I used it for various designs I had to work on for projects (mostly related to Boy Scouts)
I think you’d have to go back to sometime before writing was invented for there to be a time without spreadsheets. I remember someone mentioning that Sumerians had something akin to a spreadsheet, and Sumerian writing is literally the earliest ever discovered. One of the first hits on Google turned up this book.