Excel’s Birthday: from Adulthood to Early Retirement

Excel has become of legal age today: it was first introduced on this day, 21 years ago, reminds us the Zoho Blog.  

 There are some surprising facts in Wikipedia’s history of Excel entry: the first version, released in 1985 was actually for the Mac, and the first Windows version was only released 2 years later.  While it sounds unrealistic for a Microsoft product today, back then it was rather logical:  The PC platform (DOS) already had a dominant spreadsheet solution: Lotus 1-2-3.  In fact Lotus became the IBM PC’s killer app, the very reason to use a PC at all.   The market was Lotus’s to lose, and they did so in the years to come, by not migrating early enough to the Windows platform.

I’m going to reveal a personal secret here: my current knowledge and usage of Excel is probably still on the level of Lotus 1-2-3, and I don’t suppose I am alone.   I suspect instead of the popular 80/20 rule a 90/10 rule applies here: 90% of Excel users don’t need more than 10% of it’s functionality.

Which is why Excel can celebrate becoming an adult, then retire immediately as far as I am concerned.  I’m already “inthe cloud” and am quite happy with the ease-of-use, accessibility, availability and ease of sharing/collaboration using Zoho Sheet.  Of course I am not entirely condemning Excel to retirement: it will still have a part-time job, for the “hardcore” users that need the myriad of more sophisticated functions. 

If you’d like to find out more about office tools, collaboration, just how Microsoft Office and the Office 2.0 suites can co-exist, there’s no better place to turn but the Office 2.0 Conference – see you there!

Tags: Excel, Microsoft+Office, MS+Office, Lotus, Lotus+1-2-3, spreadsheet, Office+2.0, office20con, +WebOffice, Zoho, ZohoSheet