A certain millennial turned 30 recently: Welcome to middle age, Microsoft Excel

The Register ^ | Nov 24, 2017 | Damon Hart-Davis

[Jeff Chandler]

Physiologically people here are younger than before.

Psychologically, too.

[Reeses]

I personally believe the introduction of the spreadsheet in the mid 80’s contributed greatly to the Wall-Street LBO and takeover boom of the 2nd half of that decade.

Many businesses were destroyed and many people lost their jobs due to a new type of cube dweller: the MBA spreadsheet monkey. While spreadsheets are great for inputting numbers, it's very difficult to input non-numbers like quality, skill, and wisdom.

[SoFloFreeper]

not only that, but 30 is NOT “middle age”.

[buckalfa]

After having failed as a manager of people, Excel allowed me to find an employment niche I could be successful with. Colorful charts and graphs chock full of meaningless information for upper management.

[ßuddaßudd]

I use everyday at werkz..

[ptsal]

Already Microsoft’s flagship product has exhibited so many “human” traits:
<>buy out the neighbors
<>failure to consummate the marriage (Yahoo)
<>physical breakdown — the Blue Screen of Death

[ptsal]

Did you salvage my old hard drive?

[norwaypinesavage]

My first spreadsheet was Lotus 1 2 3, along which came along with WordPerfect on an IBM PC. The PC had an astonishing 64K of volatile memory, much larger than the 12K iron core in my PDP 11s. The PC would boot to a BASIC interpreter if there was no 'floppy' in either of the two 5-1/4 drives. This was a MAJOR advance over paper tape, and a bootstrap loader that had to be toggled in with switches, one bit at a time.

'1 2 3' had a feature still missing from Excel today. Our company liked to see salary charts plotted as age vs. annual salary. It later became 'experience' vs. salary as ageism became undesirable. Experience was simply (age - 21). Lotus allowed placing a label anywhere around a data point, above, below, left, right, and more. Excel 97 allowed simply above the point. Excel would make salary charts unreadable for even small departments by over writing names and data points. I would enter the data in Excel, translate it to Lotus, move the labels to make the charts clear, then translate them back to Excel for presentation. I still use Excel (and no longer '1 2 3') for reports and presentations and some analyses. I have run up against size limits for large multichannel time sampled data sets, but simple decimation software fixes that for most report quality charts.

[AppyPappy]

I moved from IT to Finance at a large corporation. My first task was to convert a Lotus 123 system to Excel. I had to learn 123 code and convert it to Excel macros. This was pre-VBA days.

[dayglored]

> Thirty is not middle aged

They may be referring to the old hippie slogan "Don't trust anybody over 30", meaning they're no longer young, and have started into middle-age.

Being a very active, rock-n-roll-playing 65-yo myself, I looked at 40 as the beginning of middle age, and as far as I'm concerned, my "middle age" will continue until I damn well decide it's over. Maybe around 80, God willing and the creek don't rise.

[KSCITYBOY]

Until a year ago excel and I spent a few hours a day together for many years

[buckalfa]

Been retired two years, but I try to keep my Excel skills fresh. I do not plan on reentering the workforce, but it keeps the gray matter from total atrophy.

[House Atreides]

I made the move to “All-things-Apple” many years ago. I should say “almost all Apple” as I still use Excel as my spreadsheet software of choice. I’m sure that Apple’s Numbers software is just as good but I know so many Excel “hacks” that I dread the learning curve I’d have to go through to get Numbers to do the same “tricks” I have Excel doing. Oh well, maybe one day.

[KSCITYBOY]

Same boat here.

[Nifster]

Oh I remember the slogan...those who used it thought thirty was decrepit

[zeugma]

I wonder if, after 30 years, Excel is finally capable of dealing with dates that extend across centuries. I have a file on my National Debt webpage that tracks the debt going back to 1791. I am able to produce a fairly horrific chart using LibreOffice, but it hasn't worked correctly in Excel ever since Microsoft 'fixed' their Y2K issues. On the above page is a link to the LibreOffice version, as well as a CSV that Excel should be able to import. Unfortunately, I can no longer test it in Excel.

[dayglored]

You might consider getting (free) LibreOffice for your Mac, since the “Calc” in that is considerably more Excel-compatible than Numbers, according to my spreadsheet-using friends who have one foot in the Mac camp and the other in the Windows camp.

[Baynative]

I am in search of a good service for sending large files. I tried to use Dropbox and they have non existing customer service, so I want something I can rely on.

[dayglored]

> I am in search of a good service for sending large files. I tried to use Dropbox and they have non existing customer service, so I want something I can rely on.

Customer service is a rare and precious thing these days. Dropbox and similar services are priced based on minimal-to-no personal service -- it's a "do it yourself, you can figure it out" approach, to keep prices down in an incredibly competitive market.

That said, there may be higher-priced file-sharing outfits that provide a better amount of customer service. I don't know of one offhand, but other FReepers may be able to chime in.

If nobody responds on this thread, consider creating a vanity thread yourself with the question, and address a comment to let Swordmaker, ThunderSleeps, and me know about it so we can ping our respective Ping Lists for you.