Posted on 11/26/2017 9:24:47 PM PST by dayglored
Launched a million business plans, sank Lotus...
Thirty is a ripe old age, maybe older than a good chunk of Register readers. Even for those of you for whom Excel is a spring chicken, how many applications or even operating systems are you still using of a similar age outside the Office suite?
Is Windows 10 the same OS as Windows 2.0? Is that still your grandfather's axe, now that you have replaced the head and your father replaced the handle?
Microsoft's legendary spreadsheet software was born in November 1987. Note to both of you Apple-non-fanbois out there, there was no V1.x for Windows: Excel was first released for the Mac. When ported to Windows 2.x the versions for both OSes were synced at 2.0.
Steve Jobs said that an Excel forerunner, VisiCalc, was: “What propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved,” and made Apple the company into the monster that it became, in spite of spreadsheets being the least cool app ever. Compare and contrast with 1987's real cool tech such as the boombox, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and the T800 Transputer.
Spreadsheets can do amazing things, much more than just adding up columns of numbers: what-if business modelling, field data collection, data charting, and even live trading in the City, but like all good tools they can be used badly. Fumble-fingered formulae and worse references than a fraudster applying to run a bank.
[Lots more at the link...]
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
Psychologically, too.
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.
not only that, but 30 is NOT “middle age”.
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.
I use everyday at werkz..
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
Did you salvage my old hard drive?
'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.
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.
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.
Until a year ago excel and I spent a few hours a day together for many years
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.
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.
Same boat here.
Oh I remember the slogan...those who used it thought thirty was decrepit
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.
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.
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