Excel is practically synonymous with the word "spreadsheet" today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn't always the reignin...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/1047745

Excel is practically synonymous with the word “spreadsheet” today, and has attained near ubiquity in the workplace and home. But it wasn’t always the reigning champion of the spreadsheet market.

In fact, Excel started out as a Macintosh exclusive, with Gates and Microsoft hoping that Excel could build a commanding position on the Macintosh, and then use that as a foothold to attack the dominant spreadsheet champion of the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3. The Macintosh was in dire need of a killer app that could do for it, what VisiCalc had done for the Apple II years prior.

But could Excel be that app?

This is the story of how the world’s most dominant spreadsheet was developed for the flailing Macintosh, a computer with a fraction of the market share of the then standard MS-DOS PC, from which humble position Excel began its long climb to total dominance.

#spreadsheet #excel #documentary

  • NickwithaCEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Are they so different that you could not move from one to the other?

    • TimeSquirrel
      3•1 year ago

      The spreadsheet programs, yes, once you’ve learned one you’ve learned them all, but I highly recommend anyone learning programming to avoid BASIC entirely just because horrible coding practices are basically baked into the language and the syntax is so dissimilar from anything else out there. There were a lot of things I had to “unlearn” when I got into C and C++.