I spent about three years learning 1-2-3. I resisted Excel…until all of our budgeting went on it.
But I am not a day over 30….
I was the office Lotus 123 master. I made a few bucks on the side converting Lotus files to Excel.
I bought the very first Apple SE30 for a major oil company to do a project with Excel about 1987 or so. To get it I had to appear before the regional VP to explain why we needed it. I had been to an Oracle class and attempted to use that but it just was not up to par for what we wanted to accomplish. The SE30 was a luggable computer, certainly not a portable or laptop. I think the 30 was for the weight in lbs but it seemed like kilos sometimes.
I called my first business Windows of Opportunity in the days of Excel 2.0 By the second year it was EXCELerate Consulting where I did XLM and then VBA programming. I still have a client from 1993. For some years I supported our family through Excel consulting contracts.
Old? Ha!
Switches and hand-assembled machine language.
Audio cassette tapes, digital cassette tapes.
8” hard- and soft-sectored floppies.
5” hard- and soft-sectored floppies.
3.5” floppies.
ZIP drives
Tandon removable drives
Hewlett-Packard Basic - Dandy for instruments and test equipment with the HPIB lashup.
But the worst one?
Baby sister has grandkids, and they’re going to be popping great-grands within the next 5 years. I used to change her diapers. I think she does it on purpose to make me feel old.
No kidding. In the ‘97 version of Excel, there was an “Easter Egg” flight simulator. To access it, you would put a certain code in a specific cell and hit a certain function. The screen would flicker and then you could fly a little squat “plane” over mountains. It was cool at the time I suppose. CBNS
I had a brown bag version of 1-2-3, ran on a 640k DOS machine. Once I realized I could import specific cells from one spreadsheet to a location in a separate spreadsheet I became a mad woman and would get lost for hours. Those were the good old days.
I could barely fill out my time sheet at work which used Excel with some formula to add up the hours. Below is the only thing I know and I had to write it down...
Excel Tip:
To make the columns in a table automatically fit the contents, Autofit columns
Click where the row and column headers meet in upper left. This will select the entire sheet.
Then double-click any one of the column partition lines. Double click on the dividing line.
It is as quick as you can get.
Another way:
1. Select The Full Spreadsheet as above.
2. Select Format button
3. Autofit Column width
I get this guys email newsletter. Here is his Youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@trumpexcel/videos
TrumpExcel - Excel Tips by Sumit Bansal
https://trumpexcel.com
I still have a copy of Smartsuite for OS/2 around here someplace. and had a copy of multiplan for DOS too
I’m in the Lotus camp.
And Paradox for databases.
LibreOffice’s Calc is great as part of a free office suite, but I still find Excel to be easier to use and more robust. < |:(~
bump
to this day, i do not think excel handles Y2K issues gracefully