
A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge (1984) - tbolse
https://medium.com/backchannel/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge-8de60af7146e
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guylhem
Great quote about how spreadsheets where empowering:

 _The company’s chief financial officer wanted certain information, and his
top “experts” had difficulty providing it. So one weekend he brought an Apple
computer and a copy of VisiCalc home with him. Monday morning, he called his
people in and showed them how he had gotten the information he had been
clamoring for. “With one swipe of the diskette, he cut them off at the knees.”
Stein said. “He out-teched them. His experts! He’d cut the chain. The
following week, they all came down to learn VisiCalc – fast.”_

That's the kind of disruptive technonology that'll get you sales. Making
things done, and having Cx0s demanding your product.

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nrao123
This is a really great article. This part is so good:

 _The spreadsheet embodies, embraces, that end, and ultimately serves to
reinforce it. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “We shape our tools and thereafter
our tools shape us.” The spreadsheet is a tool, and it is also a world view —
reality by the numbers. If the perceptions of those who play a large part in
shaping our world are shaped by spreadsheets, it is important that all of us
understand what this tool can and cannot do._

Steve Sinofsky
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky))
made a similar point on HN yesterday:

 _Second, people tend to underestimate the way that new tools, as ineffective
as they are, drive changes in the very definition of work. Said another way,
people forget that tools can also define the work and jobs people have. It isn
't like work was always "mail around a 10MB presentation before the meeting".
In fact a long time ago meeting agendas were typed out in courier by a typist
-- that job was defined by the Selectric. The tools that created
presentations, attachments, and follow up email defined a style of working.
While we're reading all this, the exponential rise of mobile is changing what
it means to work--to go to a meeting, to collaborate, to decide, to create,
etc._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525444)

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scrumper
This is a good read, and far from a one-sided paean of praise for the
spreadsheet. Lots of discussion of pitfalls.

This is a fun quote:

 _Already, the spreadsheet has redefined the nature of some jobs; to be an
accountant in the age of spreadsheet program is — well, almost sexy._

~~~
0003
As an accountant, sexy is not how I feel. I think the right word is
sexworker... I kid.

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edraferi
_Stockman’s sleight of hand was fairly easy to discern. In 1981, electronic
spreadsheets were just coming into their own, and the kind of sophisticated
modeling Stockman did was still done chiefly on mainframe computers. The
output he was working with wasn’t in the now-familiar spreadsheet format;
instead, the formulas appeared in one place and the results in another. You
could see what you were getting. That cannot be said of electronic
spreadsheets, which don’t display the formulas that govern their
calculations._

This is the real double-edged sword of spreadsheets. They simultaneously
surface data, logic and presentation. This enables a very fluid modelling
process because you can see everything that's happening... at first.
Eventually these things always become intractable hairballs, dumped on the
desk of the office "Spreadsheet Mechanic" for critical repair. Ugh.

Excel's Data Tables, ODBC connectivity and named ranges help with this. It
gives you have some assurance that the raw data comes from a Source Of Truth
and hasn't been totally borked. Unfortunately, most users (that I have worked
with) don't understand how to use these features properly, leading to a
multitude of math crimes.

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sbensu
Everytime I read these accounts of breakthroughs I'm baffled by how everything
looks different on hindsight:

 _Bricklin’s teachers at Harvard thought he was wasting his time: why would a
manager want to do a spreadsheet on one of those “toy” computers?_

or the one about the origins of the telephone:

 _The invention is practically worthless. Don 't through your money away!_

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dghughes
After the spreadsheets were going full steam you often heard or read how
people scoffed at why anyone would want to play games on a business machine.
Most people played on their Atari or Commodore consoles not on an expensive
"IBM Compatible PC".

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PythonicAlpha
I think, spreadsheet is at least to calculation what word processors are to
writing.

~~~
calinet6
Not just calculation, but abstract data comprehension. It's a fair bit more
flexible than the word processor in this analogy.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
Yes, I think similar. That's the reason, I wrote "at least".

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whitten
This article points out again, that just in writing programs or defining a
process for an artificial intelligence processor, the knowledge put into the
system influences the view of the system.

Creating a spreadsheet model is similar to creating a Knowledge Representation
of a financial or mathematical system. The interdependencies within the
spreadsheet mimic variables whose values are tied together by causation.

Does anyone know if there is a spreadsheet interface for some of the CLP or
Prolog programming systems?

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e3pi
Reading this delightful blast in the past, made me realize how much I miss
Borland's Quattro Pro editable keyboard macros, before becoming defanged by a
competitor, Lotus?

That was a long time ago, Open Office still does not have this -- since I last
looked. Think if emacs lost its elisp editable recording keyboard macros for
some reason, what a loss. This is evidence progress is not monotonic
increasing.

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calinet6
It is incredible how much software is written solely to "do better than a
spreadsheet." And how much fails at it.

Great article.

