The Spreadsheet at 25: 25 Amazing Excel Examples that Evolved from the Invention that Changed the World

131 Pages·2005·6.78 MB·English

by  Bill Jelen

2255 AAMMAAZZIINNGG EEXXCCEELL EEXXAAMMPPLLEESS TTHHEE EEVVOOLLVVEEDD
FFRROOMM TTHHEE IINNVVEENNTTIIOONN TTHHAATT CCHHAANNGGEEDD TTHHEE WWOORRLLDD!!
HHoollyy MMaaccrroo!! BBooookkss
The Spreadsheet at 25
Copyright © 2005 Bill Jelen. All Rights Reserved
Project Manager : Anne Troy
Art Director : Scott Pierson
Production Assistant : Lisa Davis
Cover Design : Darcy Cloutier-Fernald
Pre Press : Fine Grains (India) Private Limited
Contributors: Ted Lewis, Zack Barresse, Ivan Moala, Juan Pablo González, Jacob
Hilderbrand, Brian Mulder, Mark Rowlinson, Duane Aubin, Julio Ahumada, Masaru (Colo)
Kaji, Dr. Gerard M. Verschuuren, P.K. Hari Hara Subramanian, Melissa D'Arabian, Timmy
Chan, Don Heckerman and Ravi Singh
Published by : Holy Macro! Books, 13386 Judy, Uniontown OH 44685
Distributed by : Independent Publishers Group
ISBN 978-1-932802-52-8 LCCN: 2005921880
First Printing: March 2005
All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks,
trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
THE HISTORY OF SPREADSHEETS........................4
25 WONDERS OF THE SPREADSHEET WORLD.....36
COOL THINGS PEOPLE DO WITH EXCEL.............64
25 COOL THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH EXCEL......90
CONTRIBUTORS.................................................118
CHAPTER - 1
THAT CHANGED THE WORLD!
U
sing rows and columns for
accounting can be traced back
19th Century to August DeMorgan, a
London mathematician in an
1846 book entitled Main
Principle of Bookkeeping.
August De Morgan
5
1964
Richard Mattessich
A
Berkley professor, Richard Mattessich, realized that performing budgetary what-if analyses by
hand was not productive. It could take a week to recalculate an entire budget, by which time the
original assumptions would be obsolete.
6
I
n two books published in 1964, Mattessich proposed electronic spreadsheets for
solving such problems. His Simulation of the Firm through a Budget Computer Program detailed a program that would
allow rapid recalculation of a company budget. His book included the Fortran programming code to allow any firm with a
mainframe computer to eliminate the mechanical pencils for the specific application of budgeting. Rather than being a
general-purpose program like VisiCalc, Mattessich's approach required a knowledge of the Fortran language.
M
attessich was clearly on the right track in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the
computer hardware of the time was expensive and not readily available to the
masses. Companies typically used teletype terminals to dial into a time-sharing
mainframe, where charges were accrued by the minute. It was the right idea, but
it would take fifteen years before sufficient computing power was available at a
low enough price for most companies.
7
1976
I
n the 1970's, personal computers were in their infancy. Byte magazine claimed to have
73,000 subscribers in 1976; people running computers like the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. Peter Jennings wrote
MicroChess and sold the first copy in December 1976. It was one of the first computer games and eventually sold millions of
copies. However, unless you were a hard-core chess fan, you probably were not going to pay $1000 to $2000 for a
computer for the sole purpose of playing MicroChess.
F
or the average accountant, in 1978 a “spreadsheet” was still a large
piece of green ledger paper with number figures written in with a
mechanical pencil. Any accountant at the time kept a large eraser nearby
because when you discovered that one number was wrong, all of the
subsequent rows had to be recalculated.
8