Beyond Spreadsheets

There are 303 Excel spreadsheets saved on my laptop. I’ve left twice that number behind on corporate file-shares over the years. Add a few stored in the cloud (somewhere), 1 school-kid’s training video on youtube and we’re looking at roughly 1,000 little data islands.

An archipelago of analysis, with no atlas.

Confession time. In my daughter’s posterity box, there’s a sheet of loose-leaf paper with a hand-written table and about 150 data-points. Why keep this ‘offline’ spreadsheet to show to my future grand-kids? It captures the start/end time of each contraction, the length, the frequency and a helpful ‘notes’ field. To be honest, I’m surprised it wasn’t torn into shreds on the day. As a new Dad-to-be (the trend was clear), my fight or flight response was to make a table. Don’t believe me?

There was also a pretty line chart (hand-drawn) but that seems to be have been lost in the flurry of activity…or was subsequently burnt.

Hello, I’m Luke and I’m addicted to spreadsheets.

It’s been about 35-years since Lotus 123 hit the market and a killer-app was born.

Why has the humble spreadsheet made such an impression?

I believe it comes down to 3 fundamentals

• Data Storage. There’s nowhere simpler to keep a list of data that you might need later, than an Excel spreadsheet. The number of “untitled.xls” files floating around is testament to that.
• Productivity. Computers are better than humans at processing vast quantities of data. We can do it, but a computer can do it thousands of times faster.
• Democratised Development. “New Workbook” gives you a blank canvas to create your own software solution. Spreadsheet tools are ‘app builders’ for storing data, calculating results and visualising information.

Sounds great, if only it were that simple.

In 35 years, humanity has produced millions of spreadsheets. In most cases, buried in those trillions of rows and columns is a bunch of stale data and undocumented business logic. So, with all that awesome functionality comes some significant business ‘debt’.

What are the major limitations of our ‘killer app’ and what could ‘Spreadsheet 2.0’ look like?

Read more on our blog at emergingstack.com