OK, I didn’t know that I don’t think very many people knew that or cared at the time. At the time that 123 was dominant there was no interest in Excel.
This quote from Wiki:
“do everything 1-2-3 does and do it better” is laughable.
Out of the chute, although it may have been belated, Lotus 123 for Windows was better than Excel. The graphics capability was the most obvious difference. Again, Microsoft, guarding their proprietary code, used office to crush their competition.
Okaaaay. MS Word actual history:
MS Word for MS-DOS: 1983
MS Word for Mac: 1985
MS Word for Windows: 1989
I think I’ll stop right here.
Going back to the original question: I worked in the accounting office at my college during the summer of 1982, to earn some extra money. As it happened, it was just before computers started entering that area in numbers. A few people had them, but most of us still used paper, pencils, and calculators.
I spent most of my day, every day, totalling up figures on pads marked off exactly like computer spreadsheets are nowadays.
Ed
I think comparing the spreadsheet to accounting & bookkeeping sheets really sells the spreadsheet’s innovation short. Sure a spreadsheet could be used to create a balance sheet, but it can be used for so much more. With a spreadsheet you don’t just have to add up numbers in columns, you can put numbers and formulas in any cell and have the values jump all over the place. This opens up the ability not just to use the spreadsheet to do your math, but to use the spreadsheet to do your formatting and page layout as well.
People use spreadsheets to do all kinds of tasks: baseball line-ups, employee work schedules, categorizing shopping lists, D&D character sheets, process forms – really any task that is represented data in a table format. If the data has numbers and formulas, all the better.
I really think the spreadsheet’s closest cousin is graph paper. Pretty much every task you want to do on graph paper can be replaced with a spreadsheet. If you added numbers up manually, then the spreadsheet could do it for you. And if you made a mistake, you could just print it out again. Beginning with Lotus 1-2-3, you could actually graph the data too. The rise of the spreadsheet has really diminished the need for graph paper. I remember working with my dad to create various reports for his work using WordStar. It was a tremendous pain to make the data line-up, then change a value and have to re-align again. The formatting was a bigger pain than the math. Once we got our hands on Lotus 1-2-3 (version 1A IIRC), life got so much simpler.
As far as 1-2-3’s fall to Excel: I don’t know if their failure was due to Microsoft holding out on them so much as their loss of focus in general. They had already started to lag on features compared to 3rd parties. I think the first WYSIWYG functionality on 1-2-3 for DOS was after-market software. Lotus had trouble transitioning from to DOS to Windows on several of their apps. And yet, somehow, they managed to create the most craptacular piece of major software – Lotus Notes (a.k.a. Lotus Bloats, Lotus Goats, and Lotus Blows Goats). Why anyone would require 70 MBs to read email is beyond me. I suspect some people at IBM agreed, since they created a lightweight client to use internally.
**What did people use before spreadsheets? **
Accountants would use large sheets of paper with a grid, pencils, etc. and kept things in large ledger books.
But as for me, pre-spreadsheets (yes, I used VisiCalc, SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and now Excel), I wrote small programs that did all the calculations and printed the results in neat tables with headings and row names. It was easy. But spreadsheets made things even easier. Generally, any reporting that required a lot of number crunching was done with customized programs. Spreadsheet programs allowed non-programmers to take control of their own computing needs. That’s the power of the software and what sold a lot of personal computers in the early days.
I believe the large 11"x17" or 14"x17" accounting paper was often called worksheet paper, in addition to being called spreadsheet paper.
In 1980 I was a young teenager looking to buy an Apple ][ computer. I went to one of the few computer stores on Long Island with my father, an accountant, to shop. The salesman showed my father VisiCalc, and he was blown away. The idea that you could set up a spreadsheet with formulas that would automatically recalculate and total across and down the table was revolutionary. Of course we bought VisiCalc.
Because of this, he bought the first generation of IBM PCs when they came out, with VisiCalc and WordStar software. I worked in his office setting up financial statements and other reports on VisiCalc.
Eventually, Lotus 1-2-3 came out as a fairly direct knock-off of VisiCalc. The early versions of VisiCalc were slightly more powerful and easy to use than VisiCalc. Lotus kept improving, and eventually the firm switched. Lotus hung on until Microsoft began offering its Office suite, including Excel, with most Windows computers, and the vast majority of new spreadsheet users began using Excel.
And comparing the calculator tape to the written columns to see any errors!
Lotus 123 for windows didn’t come out for years after Excel was available. And my recollection is different than yours. I recall that Excel made a huge splash when it arrived, and in fact it drove the sales of Macs. You could get a PC with an archaic spreadsheet, or get a Mac and get a much better one.
No, sorry; your recollection is flawed. I worked in software retail from 1991 through 1996 and had direct experience with the named products.
Both WordPerfect and Lotus let Microsoft have the advantage by not switching over to Windows until well after Microsoft Windows had become the standard platform for most businesses. WordPerfect’s first attempt at a Windows based platform - WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows - was widely recognized as a buggy mess. By the time the more stable WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows came out, most people had switched over to MS Word 2.0 because it was a better program for Windows.
No “marketing power” here; after 6 out of the first 10 WP 5.1 for Windows came back as returns, the salespeople started selling Word, which rarely came back as a return.
Your first link includes this comment:
Let me offer another WAG – the band helped keep their sleeves pulled up so their cuffs would keep clear of the inkpots.
Me either. As far as I’m concerned this is the Unexpectedly Great Thread of the Month. 
I was a computer geek from a very young age, programming in BASIC (and later Assembly) on Commodores and Apple IIx machines and the like, so naturally my mother, when confronted with the need to learn Lotus123 to do her job, invited me to her office after hours several times to sit with her and help her figure it out. Staring at the glowing green figures on the black CRT, I could almost hear the angels singing… 
Windows? What Windows? We were using Excel on the Mac when PC users were still laughing at our ‘mice’.
I’m no cheerleader for Microsoft (trust me on that), but Excel was actually one quite nice app. It was powerful, intuitive (rare for MS), and, within the confines of “well no they didn’t invent the spreadsheet”, innovative. When creating a formula, you could just drag across a range of cells to specify them.
:eek:
Care to help me on a walk-through?
Lotus 123 DOS Release 2.2 versus Excel Mac ver. 2.2, fair enough?
I set up my data (simple array of 3 columns and 3 rows of numbers, nothing fancy). In Lotus, I hit the slash key to bring up the menus. Arrow arrow arrow arrow arrow arrow to select Graph to get started. Well, it does indeed have a lot of options. I start with setting the Type (hit return, confirm “Line”, go to “Quit” to tell it I’m finished setting the type). Now to set the data ranges. Select “X”. Hit return. I’m back at the spreadsheet. Type in start value, “…” end value. Or it can be done with the arrow keys and the spacebar. Now to set the “A” column of data. Arrow over to “A” and repeat the process of entering start value and end value. Repeat again for “B”, and so on.
Can I see what I’ve got so far, before I add titles and legends and whatnot? Arrow over to View and hit return. The explanatory bit under the menu says “View the current graph”, yeah, that’s what I wanna do, but nothing’s happening. WTF? Can you help me out here? I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong?!@?
Let’s try it in Excel. Enter same simple data, go to File:New, and I get this dialog, I select “Chart” and hit “OK”. Bang, I’ve got a chart!. It didn’t ask me about ranges because I had selected the range I wanted for datasource beforehand (whatever the active cells were). But I didn’t specify a chart type, what if it was the wrong kind? Gallery menu lets me switch types. How about legends and titles and all that stuff? Chart menu gives me those choices. And if I double-click the chart itself, I get more graphical formatting choices.
Now, perhaps this is profoundly unfair: I know my way around Excel because I used it all the time (and still do); it’s a bit of a step back from the version I use on my G4 PowerBook these days, but I relied on Excel 2.2 on my little SE back when I was a college student, pasting those elegant little charts and spreadsheets right into my term papers (Command-C, Command-V, baby!). Whereas I might not be floundering in Lotus 123 if I’d actually been a user of it in the day.
So would you care to demonstrate it ease, power, and intuitiveness, a task I’m evidently not up for here?
Yes, but do you remember ‘MacPlan’ and ‘MacGraph’. I used these on a original 512K Mac. Later, when Excel came out but you needed an 800k disk drive to run it, I dismissed it as ‘bloated’.
Ever so slightly before my time, UncleRojelio. I cut my teeth in a “mac lab” populated with 512Ke’s, 800K drives in every one of 'em.
By the time I got my hands on Excel, I (as student newspaper editor) had 24-hour access to an SE with a 20 MB internal HD, and life was good
[even further off thread]
By the time I got my hands on an SE, I was having to layout printed circuit cards on that tiny b&w screen. Those were the days!
[/even further off thread]
Before spreadsheets (electronic versions) there were paper versions. But what spreadsheets are now used for encompasses tasks that were once separate, and tackled differently. Examples:
Long columns of figures: An adding machine, if you could afford it. I used to use a plastic, hand-held, 4-wheel, stylus-driven cog-operated device to help Mom add up her students’ test scores (she was a First Grade teacher), then calculate averages by hand, since the device only added or subtracted, and there was no paper tape, so we had to do it several times until we got the same answer twice, and watch out for overflow. (Other teachers who didn’t have slave kids nearby used pencil & paper.) Later I worked in a brokerage back office where we had electric desk calculators of large typewriter size. They cost about $2000 each and made a lot of noise when they multiplied by shifting the carriage repeatedly.
Graphs: Slide rule, graph paper, lots of patience. I graphed functions endlessly (and slowly) in high school, fascinated by how formulas produced different shapes on both cartesian and polar co-ordinate paper. At least we didn’t have to draw the reference lines!
Financial records: Ledgers. For large operations, many ledgers: large, heavy binders. Take summary figures from one set of books, hand-enter them into another set. Lots of work at month-end and year-end to close out and recreate entire sets. For multiple companies, multiple sets of ledgers.
Financial projections: Spreadsheet on paper. Change one cel, recalculate everything else that was affected by hand. Lots of erasures.
Functional differences between Visicalc and 123 spreadsheets? More workspace in 123 because it was designed for the more memory that was usually installed in an IBM PC, in 123 you could make your columns different widths while column width was global in Visicalc, and the slash commands were actually spelled out in 123 so you didn’t have to remember that “C” meant “Clear” not “Copy” and that you wanted “R” for “Replicate” which was good without an undo command. Otherwise, 123 was close enough for a major lawsuit these days, but patent law in the late 70s didn’t include computer programs. It was funny-sad a few years later when Lotus sued companies whose products were too close to the patented 123.
In pondering the OP, I am reminded of how unhappy I was when Visicalc came out. I was making really good money doing custom analysis software, and Visicalc killed that business for me. In one case, I had spent two months writing a custom application, and ended up building a set of spreadsheets to replace it in about three days. sigh I made really good buggy whips, too! 
I was using Word on the Mac before Microsoft Windows even existed.
IMHO, the IBM PC didn’t really revolutionize office computing. It didn’t do anything that couldn’t already be done: it just had IBM’s name and credibility attached. I was using Visicalc on the Apple ][ and Apple /// even after my company started buying PCs. I had very large complex spreadsheets (at least by the standards of the early 1980s) that worked perfectly well, and I saw no need to change computers. The PC was cheaper than the CP/M machines we were using for accounting, so we switched over the finance department, but we stuck with Apple in marketing/sales and Unix in engineering.
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.
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.
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.
I have been pondering spreadsheet usage today. Mileage. I use my car in my job a few days a week, and have to submit my mileage for reimbursement. Excel totes up my trips!
Nanowrimo–there’s a nifty spreadsheet for calculating all sorts of variables in a NaNoWriMo project.
I am trying to think of a way to use it to track writing submissions now.
