# What did people use before spreadsheets? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 12, 2006, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159 "2006-11-12T22:56:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 8:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/61 "2006-11-15T08:52:19Z")
[QUOTE=Spartydog] My whole point is while Word an Excel may have been used on the Apple, few businesses, outside of publishing and graphics, were using Apple computers. In general, nobody except the Appleites used or knew of Word and Excel. Apparantly, Microsoft was testing them in the Apple graphics interface so that they could integrate them with Windows. Shame on Lotus and Wordperfect for not using the same strategy. For general purposes, Excel and Word didn’t exist until MS Office was created to integrate them seamlessly with Windows. [/quote] Microsoft didn’t put Excel on the Mac to ‘test them on the graphics interface’. Microsoft was into Mac software in a big way, and Excel and Word were huge hits in the marketplace. The Mac was an extremely popular platform back then. I was using personal computers since 1975. When the Mac came out in 1984, I was selling computers to help put myself through college, and I was studying computer engineering. The Apple II WAS in lots of businesses. Visicalc put it there. Visicalc was the program that caused the phrase “Killer App” to enter the lexicon. Businesses were buying Apple IIs for no reason other than to run Visicalc. Lotus 123 appeared on the PC, and as much as the IBM name it helped the PC enter business in a big way. The spreadsheet was THE app to have on a PC at the time, and 123 was king for a number of years. But the Mac and Excel were strong competitors right out of the gate (well, Excel took a year or so after the Mac was released, but it was an instant hit). Most people I knew thought Excel was superior to 123. I used both on a daily basis, and I thought Excel was superior. The GUI and mouse interface was just made for spreadsheets, and it changed the whole experience. I knew lots of people who abandoned their PCs and bought Macs simply because they felt the Mac has a superior spreadsheet. When Microsoft created Windows, they knew they needed a Killer App of their own for it, so they ported Word and Excel, and sales took off. I remember when Lotus was the giant among software companies, towering over all others. But Excel ate their lunch. Lotus took its sweet time porting 123 to Windows, and by the time they did Excel was already outselling 123 by a pretty big margin. Then they screwed up their first couple of Windows releases, and were pretty much done. Borland came out with Quattro, and a few other spreadsheets appeared, and by then the market was pretty much Excel, then everyone else all lumped together. > [@](#): > > I’m being called out to remember keystrokes from 15 years ago. Sorry, I don’t remember and am not going to try to recreate a 1990’s computer to try to prove a point. I will contend that the graphs produced by Excel compared to the graphs produced by 123 for Windows were far inferior. The intuitiveness of Excel compared to 123 for Windows was inferior. Excel and 123 were not really in competition until Windows became a standard. Comparisons of releases before Windows is immaterial. The user interface for Excel was much, much better. Excel was smart enough to detect which cells in the spreadsheet to update, where 123 simply updated them all, all the time. That made Excel perform much better. Excel had formatting tools for the sheet so you could change fonts, add borders, and in general make really spiffy looking reports. Excel, with its GUI front end, had more cells visible on the page. The mouse made selecting them much easier. It was simply a better product. The market agrees with me. Excel and 123 went head-to-head, and Excel administered a royal smackdown on 123. > [@](#): > > Excel and Word were cheap rip-offs of 123 and Wordperfect. It’s just that through integration and marketing Microsoft was able to bully them to the forefront. The sad thing is that Windows was, and continues to be, a crappy standard for personal computing. We all suffer as a result. Word bears almost no relationship to Wordperfect. It never did. Even before Windows, Word used a quasi-graphical user interface with a popup menu system that you could tab through, whereas Wordperfect had a huge collection of keystroke combinations you had to memorize. As I recall, Word had a better WYSIWYG interface, too. Wordperfect might have been more powerful, and it might have been better for power users, but Word was much more accessible. I’m curious why you think Word ‘ripped off’ WordPerfect? What did they steal, other than the concept of a word processor itself, which was hardly a new concept? ---
**Author:** ![China\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 11:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/62 "2006-11-15T11:11:33Z")
[QUOTE=Spartydog] Lotus 123 was revolutionary. Excel was an inferior immitation that only made it into the market via the marketing power of Microsoft. [/QUOTE] I gotta call bullshit on that. Excel is one of the key’s to microsoft success. lotus waite so long to _gasp_ have drop down menus. when I went to biz school in 1990, the computer class waiver test asked questions like ‘what key strokes in lotus are required to do task x.’ Excel on the mac and works already had drop downs. anyone forced to use both products in 1990 clearly knew which one would win. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/63 "2006-11-15T11:53:22Z")
I first saw VisiCalc on a 1983 TV show called _Bits and Bytes_ starring Luba Goy and Billy Van. They gave a five-minute intro and when my high school got hold of the program, I was all over it, easily the (admittedly small) school’s resident expert. I used it to make school schedules for myself and others. Later on, around 1984-5 or so, I used the program to help me design vehicles for the _Car Wars_ roleplaying game, with formulae for tallying weight and calculating acceleration. Windows was for chumps. Power-users had the keystrokes memorized. I occasionally play _AutoDuel_ (the computerized version of _Car Wars_) on an Apple emulator. They key is to go to Atlantic City, where the poker odds favour the player. Also, if you take a bus out of a city that doesn’t have a garage, the truck stop guy will ask “Are you sure you wanna leave your car on the streets?” Just hit Escape and you and your car will be instantly transported to the next city. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/64 "2006-11-15T16:13:16Z")
[QUOTE=Spartydog] I’m being called out to remember keystrokes from 15 years ago. Sorry, I don’t remember and am not going to try to recreate a 1990’s computer to try to prove a point. [/quote] Why should you have to remember a keystroke? It’s “intuitive”, remember? 😉 > [@](#): > > I will contend that the graphs produced by Excel compared to the graphs produced by 123 for Windows were far inferior That may well be; I was thinking Lotus 123 DOS vs. Excel. Which was the comparison that killed off Lotus. By the time they had a good Windows release, they had a huge marketshare problem. To be fair to Lotus, Microsoft was less than forthcoming about the entirety of the Windows API. There’s a _reason_ that when the curtain was peeled back from Windows 3.x it was mainly Microsoft applications that were ready to run on it. WordPerfect got shafted in a similar way. They didn’t have access to the OS hooks to the same degree as the application dev team at Microsoft. But Lotus 123 for MS-DOS was most profoundly _not_ intuitive. Lotus 123 for Windows did not exist yet. And therefore give credit to Excel, and never _mind_ who did or did not notice it over yonder on the Mac: it was _not_ just a ripoff of Lotus 123, and that’s where we came in. It _was_ easier to use. It _was_ a hell of a lot more intuitive. It _was_ innovative (not in the sense that VisiCalc was, but definitely innovative nonetheless). ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/65 "2006-11-15T16:38:29Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] Word bears almost no relationship to Wordperfect. It never did. Even before Windows, Word used a quasi-graphical user interface with a popup menu system that you could tab through, whereas Wordperfect had a huge collection of keystroke combinations you had to memorize. [/QUOTE] Wellllll, there _was_ a keystroke (Alt - Equals) you could hit in WordPerfect 5.1 under MS-DOS that would make [real overhead menus appear](http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter03/Stuff/Lotus_v_Excel/WPmenus.jpg). (Once I discovered their existence, I wondered why the ^#$@# they weren’t perpetually on…did PC users just _like_ issuing commands by going Alt-Ctrl-F5, F2, or whatever? You didn’t have to have all that stuff memorized if you just turned on the overhead menu. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/66 "2006-11-15T16:57:43Z")
We called them columnar pads - balance sheets are something very specific, but you can do all sorts of ledger work on columnar pads - including balance sheets. We also used to have lots of mimeographed (later copied) forms that had a lot of the data you’d need in it, plus which lines to add, subtract, multiply or divide. These were called worksheets - and had more in common with the worksheets my second grader brings home than the blank pages in Excel. Think what a paper 1040 looks like. Don’t forget you have the 10 key (calculator with the tape) and you staple your tape to the the columnar sheet so audit can check your numbers. If you work for a big company, those numbers are arriving to you on 500 page reports printed on greenbar paper from the data center, you put them in these big covers, and tag the pages you need (cause you don’t need all 500 pages - maybe six or seven) with paperclips and highlight the numbers you are transferring over. I still use the graph paper sheets pretty exclusively for math and accounting classes I’m taking now - way easier to line up my numbers. And I do my accounting homework by hand - its way easier to do it in Excel, but its harder to remember how to do it on the test where I don’t have Excel - using T accounts. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2006, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/67 "2006-11-16T17:44:30Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] Even before Windows, Word used a quasi-graphical user interface with a popup menu system that you could tab through… [/QUOTE] “Quasi-graphical”? By what definition. The very first version of MS-Word I ever loaded on my Mac (for some reason 0.9 sticks in my head, but it may have been 1.0) had a full-blown GUI, just like MacWrite, but with lots more functionality. ---
**Author:** ![PBear42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/68 "2006-11-17T02:29:35Z")
I’m a bit surprised no one has mentioned Microsoft’s pre-Excel spreadsheet program for DOS, which was called [MultiPlan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan). It was the program I used in those days, for the simple reason that it worked with a mouse. And I could get away with it because I didn’t have to integrate with anyone else, i.e., I was using it to produce spreadsheets with which no one had to be able to work except to see the printed final product. Returning to the OP, the most complex analysis I ever did with MultiPlan was an analysis of assets-and-liabilities of six related companies, depending on whether one took them as separate or consolidated. The model was so complicated (with internal cross-references to account for intercompany subrogation claims) that it took five minutes to recalculate (with a circa 1986 PC) every time I changed one of the inputs and/or formulas. [hijack] I have to disagree - respectfully but strongly - that Word for DOS was worse than WordPerfect. I had and was proficient in both. (Got my first PC in 1984; started with WordPerfect; switched to Word 1.1; worked in a firm in 1989 that went to WordPerfect, which I learned again to “fit in.”) IMHO, Word was _ **much** _ better. Admittedly, to get that advantage, you had to understand and use style sheets (as templates were then known). To get the same functionality from WordPerfect, you needed a huge library of macros, and even then macros weren’t as good as style sheets, which automatically propogated format changes from a single source. For that matter, as a word processor, I think Word for DOS was better than Word for Windows, for two reasons: less buggy and it supported division (now section) formatting at the style sheet (now template) level. [/end hijack] ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/69 "2006-11-17T03:39:08Z")
Just trying to point out some facts. The first WYSIWYG document editor was Bravo for Xerox Altos. (Which was the first word processor I used.) It was in the process of becoming something called BravoX when Gates hired its lead developer in 1981 to produce Word. (Who in turn brought in another key developer.) Timeline: First version of Bravo for Xerox Altos: 1974 First version of WordPerfect (for Data General minis): 1982 First version of Word (based on Bravo/BravoX): 1983 Note that Word for MS-DOS was a huge step backwards from Bravo. It was the Mac version that really was the first decent MS document editor. WordPerfect was a competitor (among many) to Word, nothing more. Of course, to MS, competitor is a four letter word. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/70 "2006-11-17T04:00:46Z")
[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat] “Quasi-graphical”? By what definition. The very first version of MS-Word I ever loaded on my Mac (for some reason 0.9 sticks in my head, but it may have been 1.0) had a full-blown GUI, just like MacWrite, but with lots more functionality. [/QUOTE] Sorry, I was talking about Word for DOS. It’s been over 20 years since I used it, but it had a popup menu system. You’d hit a key (probably one of the function keys - I can’t remember) and the top few lines would be replaced by a menu, and you could use the arrow keys to bounce around between all the options. This meant you could learn to use the program without having to crack the manual and remember dozens of special key combinations, like you did with Wordperfect. The section-based style sheets were also very cool, with the sections depicted on the screen. It had a number of other unique features. Now granted, it sucked compared to the full GUI version of Word that eventually landed in Windows, but compared to other DOS based word processors it had some unique advantages. ---
**Author:** ![Jurph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/50afbb/32.png) [@Jurph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jurph)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/71 "2006-11-17T13:02:17Z")
[QUOTE=Raguleader] 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) [/QUOTE] Wait… you mean there’s paper that _doesn’t_ have quarter-inch grids on it? What the hell do people use it for? 😃 I’ve got a pad of Staedtler’s famous green graph paper on my carry-everywhere clipboard at work, one pad at home, and a third pad stashed away inside the classified workspace. If I’ve got something to write down that’s not important enough for a page of graph paper, I just scribble it down on the back of an 80-column punch card. If it’s something I can’t afford to lose, I’ll put it in Excel or Google Spreadsheet. ---
**Author:** ![FRDE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e68b1a/32.png) [@FRDE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FRDE)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/72 "2006-11-17T13:50:47Z")
My first sight of a Spreadsheet was in 1977 when I was working as an intern in a large UK company. It was a big sheet of paper. It would take a guy an afternoon to produce a single DCF (Discounted Cash Flow) - being idle, I found a teletype that ran APL and reduced the process to typing time. Visicalc definately made the Apple II, and Lotus was a rip off of Visicalc, by a guy who used to work for them as ‘an ergonomics consultant’. The neat thing is that while useful for other disciplines, computer spreadsheets were magic for accountants - and they are the ones who control the purse strings. MS were useless at Apps, their Word for DOS and Multimate were laughable, but they got it right later on. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/73 "2006-11-17T22:04:07Z")
[QUOTE=Jurph] If I’ve got something to write down that’s not important enough for a page of graph paper, I just scribble it down on the back of an 80-column punch card. [/QUOTE] Y’know, you can sell those on eBay to the vintage computer fans. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159/74 "2006-11-17T22:55:16Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] Sorry, I was talking about Word for DOS. It’s been over 20 years since I used it, but it had a popup menu system. You’d hit a key (probably one of the function keys - I can’t remember) [/quote] Alt, actually > [@](#): > > … and the top few lines would be replaced by a menu, and you could use the arrow keys to bounce around between all the options. This meant you could learn to use the program without having to crack the manual and remember dozens of special key combinations, like you did with Wordperfect. The section-based style sheets were also very cool, with the sections depicted on the screen. It had a number of other unique features. > > Now granted, it sucked compared to the full GUI version of Word that eventually landed in Windows, but compared to other DOS based word processors it had some unique advantages. [Word for MSDOS](http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter03/Stuff/Lotus_v_Excel/DOSword.jpg) As I said (and documented above), you could make similar overhead menus appear in WordPerfect; you had to invoke them to start with, using Alt-equals, but once they were up there, you’d navigate them the same way as Word-for-DOS. Alt key to make the menu select, downarrow or highlighted-letter to select a specific command. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-people-use-before-spreadsheets/380159.md?page=3)