It’s National Spreadsheet Day

I’m a big fan of spreadsheets, so I was intrigued that October 17th is National Spreadsheet Day.

On October 17, 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers.

A Brief History of Spreadsheets

• 1800 BC – Babylonians used clay tablets to store data.
• 1906 – A “spread sheet” is a grid of rows and columns in a paper accounting ledger.
• 1961 – Electronic spreadsheets begin replacing paper.

Enter VisiCalc with formulas, automatic recalculation, and more.

Google Sheets was the first multi-user, web-based application.

Spreadsheets Are More Than Accounting Tools

Use them for:

• Budgets
• Calendars and Schedules
• Charts and graphs
• Attendance
• Sign-ups
• To-dos
• Planners
• Gantt Charts
• Project Management
• Lists
• Lesson plans
• Family Trees

I also found:

• A Drum Machine playing drum music.
• Games
• Apps created using Excel. Example, Glide.
• A flight simulator
• Pixel art made by uploading an image in Excel.
• Animations in Excel using VBA
• Even more sophisticated animation using raytracing (see the image of spheres above and NOTES.)

How do you use spreadsheets?

NOTES:

Wikipedia is the source for spreadsheet history on this post.

Other spreadsheet release dates:

• Microsoft Excel on September 30, 1985
• Google Sheets on June 6, 2006
• Apple Numbers on August 7, 2007

Miscellany:

• Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates: Sometimes it’s easer to rewrite genetics than update Excel (The Verge)
• Covid: how Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 test results in England  (The Guardian)
• Meet Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 77-Year-Old Artist Who ‘Paints’ Japanese Landscapes With Excel (Colossal)
• The image of spheres is from the video, Raytracing in Excel – Improved!! The spheres were generated with code in Excel.