On the weekend I received a very nice email from someone who has been using the Excel tutorials on my Contextures website. She’s been working for a long time, and only recently started learning how to use Excel and Word.
I don’t remember exactly when I started using Excel, but it was definitely on a Mac, and probably around 1987. That puts me in the 21+ years of Excel category.
How about you? How long have you been using Excel?
Let me know in the comments, thanks!
I first used Excel on a Mac SE, when I was in a facility that was only open from 1990 to 1992. Nearly two full decades.
We’re old timers — but it sure doesn’t seem that long ago!
Hi Deb
A relatively late arrival to Excel, I can only go back as far 1993.
My first taste of Spreadsheets was with Visicalc on a Commodore PET 96, from which I progressed to Supercalc and went through every version through to V5, which I was dragged off “screaming and shouting” to Excel in 1993.
Glad I made the switch though it was very “painful” for the first couple of months!!!
Excel make me shine. I don’t see anything that is impossible.
@Roger — I hate to tell you, but 1993 was quite a long time ago. 😉
Thanks for describing your journey to the wonderful (usually) world of Excel!
I started with SuperCalc. Then Lotus 1-2-3 1A. Then I went to work for KPMG in 1992 and they forced my to switch to Excel. I wonder if I’d still be using 1-2-3 if I didn’t work there.
I’m not sure of the date, but I recall that I got into trouble over it. My husband had brought an “evaluation copy” home from work (on 5¼” floppies), and I had some need for it, so I installed it on my system. I didn’t think to write-protect the disks, and apparently my install data somehow got written to them, making them unusable for anyone else (I’m not clear on the specifics of this, but I definitely got into hot water, and so did he). I got my first system in 1992, so it was sometime after that date but before I got my next system in 1996; that one came with Office for Windows 95 installed. So I’m guessing (and seem to recall) that it was Office/Excel 4.0.
I first remember Excel from 1993 when I was teaching it to schoolkids (along with other computing and ICT topics like programming in logo and BASIC, databases, CAD, DTP with QuarkXpress and more fun stuff too).
It was Excel for Mac, probably around version 4?
Moved on soon after to using PCs more when I started programming for a living, did plenty of stuff in Word for end-user documentation but not much more with Excel for a while. Dabbled with 123 (Dad still prefers it, he just got a new laptop with Office 2007, I’m just waiting for him to ask how he can install 123-r5 and get it to work).
Started using Excel as a general purpose list manager / database again in about 1995, later ended up doing more analysis and reporting. Learnt how to use PivotTables.
“Still together after all these years” and teaching it to other people now. Looking forward to 2010 and showing people all those slicers and sparklines and other cool stuff.
Long live Excel and all who ‘cell’ in her!
I used to have Excel at work, but had Lotus 123 (Smartsuite 9) at home, and also a copy of Supercalc, that was a freebie on a cover disc.
@Dick, probably 85% chance you’d be using Excel by now, no matter where you ended up working.
@Suzanne, on the Mac discs we could slide the locking tab (if you remembered to do it). On the 5 1/4″ floppies, did we need tape or something to cover the hole? Funny story though, and I hope you weren’t in trouble for too long.
@AdamV, thanks for sharing your Excel history. I remember QuarkXpress and Logo too, and tons of other programs that have faded from use. I hope your Dad gives Excel 2007 a try!
@Tony, interesting mix of spreadsheets, and I don’t remember ever using Supercalc.
I started with Lotus 1-2-3 in the mid-eighties. Then sometime in the mid-nineties switched to Excel. Long before I started using PowerPoint.
I remember that my boss at that time was working in Italy for some months. And could not find anyone who could format a decent spreadsheet for him. So he faxed over the sketch and the numbers to me in Germany. I made an Excel table from it, printed it and faxed it back, so that he could copy it to overhead transparencies. No e-mail at that time and no time to send floppy disks via mail. 😉
@Ute-S, great story, and I’m not sure how we survived in business for so long without the Internet. 😉
I started with Excel for Windows 2.1 in 1988, I think. I still have the 5 1/4″ floppies at my office. It came with a run-time version of Windows, for DOS users that hadn’t purchased Windows yet. I already had Windows/286, though, so I was all set. Excel and Packrat were my first two Windows applications.
I recall that I couldn’t run an amortization schedule for a 30-year loan on Excel 2.1, because my 286 machine didn’t have enough memory. My buddy at work told me that Windows was such a pig that it would never catch on, and that I should just go back to using 1-2-3. Well, hardware prices finally fell enough that Windows did catch on, and Lotus 1-2-3 shot itself in the foot.
The spirit of 1-2-3 isn’t dead yet, though. I still run into Excel spreadsheets where former Lotus users are entering the “+” before the first cell address in formulae. Some habits are hard to break, I guess. It makes me laugh.
Then again, I still tie my shoelaces by making bunny ears.
Toad, I see those + signs at the start of Excel formulas too, even from people who’ve been using Excel for years. The first thing you learn sticks with you, I guess.
I’d never heard of Packrat, but it looks like it was a personal organizer. I used Lotus organizer way back then, so maybe it was similar to that.
And there’s nothing wrong with bunny ears — at least they’re better than velcro fasteners.
I see those formulas beginning with ‘+’, and with ‘=+’ or surrounded in ‘SUM(…)’, all too frequently, and from people who have never heard of Lotus 1-2-3…
@Jon
I’m doing a training programme at the moment where I am amazed by some of the habits of people that become ingrained over time and passed on from one person to another. Formulas such as =SUM(A1*B1) are really common with people who start off using autosum then realise they want a product instead of a sum, but they dont realise they don’t need the function at all to do this.
Equally lots of people (even at quite advanced levels) don’t seem to have a grasp of a locical statement (with a Boolean result) in its own right, and seem drawn by unseen forces to put in IF statement everywhere, such as data validation, conditional format formulas and so on. =IF(foo,”TRUE”,”FALSE”) just cracks me up every time.
Oh well, I guess the current client must have seen the light (or at least know there is a light out there somewhere) to have hired me to bring their skills up to new levels, but I still find it baffling that people don’t already know this stuff since I am about 99% self taught from books and blogs (and the built in help in the bad old days, of course). Maybe I was lucky that I was the “go to guy” for Excel, so I did not learn bad habits from others, but good practices from real experts.
Incidentally. on February 8th the topic I was teaching was using the various lookup functions, and combining these using things like INDEX and MATCH, and using functions to find which column you need for your VLOOKUP. After a day’s training I though I would relax by going through my RSS feeds and came across this post from the same day. Freaky!
Excel Price List With VLOOKUP and MATCH Function
Debra, I just remembered. I used to have a Sinclair ZX81 in the 1908’s with a 32k memory pack, and had a spreadsheet called VU-CALC !!
I’ve been using spreadsheets since about 1996. I started using two different spreadsheets programs around the same time (the school I was attending at the time was using the Microsoft Works suite on Windows 3.11, and my home computer was using a version of Corel Perfect Office 3.0). Made the jump to Excel in 1998 and haven’t looked back.
@AdamV, strange coincidence with the VLOOKUP/MATCH posting! And good point about the unnecessary IF formulas — sometimes we overcomplicate things.
@Tony, I hope you meant 1980’s, not 1908! 😉 And apparently I can see VU-CALC at a PC museum not too far from here.
@ Michael D., thanks for describing how you got started, and you made the right spreadsheet choice!
I can’t believe I’ve been using Excel for so long, but I think I can go back to 1994 with it. Prior to that I was using a spreadsheet program called (I think) DECcalc, which was part of the DEC All-In-One system which was in use by my employer at the time I started working for them (1989). Believe it or not, while DECcalc was phased out a number of years ago, we were still using the All-in-one system for our mail and some WP until last year, when the project to phase it out began!
@TheQ47, funny how the years sneak past you so quickly. I’ve never used DECcalc, but did plenty of word processing on a VAX-11/780, years ago.
I used Lotus 123 from the boys up in Cambridge, MA loved it. I was able to work it on a NEC computer, that my wife brought for me at the cost of $5000 inc a wide carriage printer. At the time there were computer shows held each year in New York City. Lotus would have their Yellow and Black banners and the crowds were all around that display area. I walked a little ways away from them as they were passing out all kinds of material. I happen to go over to the Microsoft booth and there wasn’t too many people there. I got into a conversation with one of the people there and just happen that he was the Excel promoter so to say. I remember saying “Well you really think that this will compete with them over there?” “It’s better you can do more with it.” We talked for while, he showed me this and that. Just as I was about to leave, we all had bags of misc. goodies, he reached over and dropped into my bag some articles, pens etc. On my way home on the train with my friends we were comparing our take of the loot, when I pulled out three packages of floppy disks, I think there was like ten disks in each package, which was required to load the programs. I couldn’t believe it, used it and started to learn it. Short time later, both the shows stopped and so did Lotus, in part they went with IBM but it was never the same again.
Thanks Fred! That’s a great story, and I remember that there were lots of disks required to install Excel, back in the day.
I was introduced to it in 1994, but I had been using Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro prior to that.
Thanks Ann! It’s interesting to see the paths that led people to Excel.
I think I first started using Excel in 1996 but my spreadsheet introduction was Visicalc back in 1982 which was probably more responsible for Apples early success than any other factor. From 84 I used 123 and was welded on until my employer changed to Excel. The 123 macro language was far more simpler but still effective compared to the verbose VBA. For a long time I used transition key strokes which meant that in many cases I could complete many tasks far faster than using the mouse (much to the annoyance of my peers). Would I go back to 123 now – NO.
Interesting to note other observations about key entry styles. There are times where I get annoyed by some of excels behaviour. If it is smart enough to assume an unambiguous numeric entry then why does it treat “number/number” or “number+number” as strings? The other inconsistency is its inability to assume a multi-cell highlighted area as the default print region – I think the only operation where you ignore a selected area when carrying out a process.
Along the way also used an early mainframe spreadsheet version which had a split screen with one section defining the relationships and the other section displaying the result (cumbersome!), another Lotus product Symphony, Framework and also Multiplan
Been a great ride – Whats the next 25 years going to be like?
Thanks, Ken, great story, and I guess you’ve stopped using the Transition keys now.
And you’re right – some consistency in data entry would be nice. I’d rather have the number/number or number-number treated as strings, than automatically changed to dates.
I’m sure the next 25 years will be interesting, and all the current bugs will be fixed in that period!
Just stumbled upon this thread, so here’s my 2-bits.
I started with Lotus 123 back in 1990. Went on to Quattro Pro (4, then 5) for DOS, when I changed jobs. I was horrified when I saw the new UI, and drop-down menus (instead of the familiar ‘/’ menus of Lotus 123!
But the WYSIWYG viewing and printing feature (among many other new features) convinced me to switch QPro. Not that I had a choice, anyway !
With QPro, my spreadsheet skills really improved dramatically, mainly because of its different programming language. I remember pressing Shift + F3, to show a list of key-words for various commands. With Lotus 123, you had to literally memorize or write-down the key-stroke sequence and type it *exactly* that way, to run a macro.
And if one key-stroke was wrong or missed out… well, you could even end up deleting your data !
And there was no UNDO back then… 😉
I think QPro 5 was among the first spreadsheet programs with multiple sheet tabs.
What a boon it was for people like me, who had to manage hundreds of files before that, while setting up an MIS systems with linked formulas.
THEN someone showed me the power of PivotTables in Excel 4.0 (or was it 5.0)… And I was hooked ! Never looked back since then.
AdamV mentioned about being self-taught and learning from the built-in help system.
I have been through a similar experience… I’ve learnt most of my Excel in version 5.0 which had a fantastic help system with excellent step-wise tutorials to achieve many tasks.
And of course Walkenbach’s Excel for Dummies book !
Cheers!
Khushnood
Thanks Khushnood, it’s interesting to see how you ended up in Excel, and how you learned along the way. Can’t imagine spreadsheet life without Undo though!
I started on Quattro Pro in 1990 or 1991. I loved it. It was the first mainstream product with tabs that worked. I reluctantly switched to Excel a couple of years later. “You mean I have to type “=average” instead of just “=avg” now? Oh, the horror!” Excel actually could handle =Avg and still does but it throws an error every time. As I recall, Quatrro had copyrights on all their function names so MS was forced to use =Average and display the warning. Ugh. Quattro could also handle more nested IF statements so that was a big plus. But after I found Excel pivot tables I never looked back. I can remember loading up my data, hitting refresh and then coming back from lunch 45 mins later just in time to see it finishing. I used to plan all my big refreshes around coffee breaks and lunch just to avoid having to sit there waiting, while saving the biggest refreshes for 5pm, pressing enter and then going home with fingers crossed hoping my PC was still on the next morning. Fun times!
Thanks, Jeff, and those are great spreadsheet memories, especially the loooong refreshes!
I’d forgotten about Quattro Pro, because I only used it a few times, at offices where they used WordPerfect. Those loyal users were the hardest to switch over to MS Office — “Where are my Reveal Codes?”
It was in 1987 on a Mac, for structural engineering calcs.
You picked a good year to start! 😉