‘What is a double foolscap?’ they asked.
And I went on to explain that a double foolscap is a large sheet of paper with horizontal lines – so called from the watermark of a fool’s cap used on such paper in Europe from the 15th c. onwards.
In the early 1980s, when I used to do a bit of media planning, we had no option but to create physical spreadsheets — draw vertical lines to create ‘cells’ and fill out the individual cells manually. Then we would do the calculations, cell by cell. These could take hours, or even days. From there, we have reached a stage where even a high school student has become adept at handling (digital) spreadsheets.
Microsoft Excel‘s first version was launched in 1985 for – irony alert! – Apple’s Mac. There are probably 400 mn paid users of MS Excel today around the world. But it wasn’t Excel that started the spreadsheet revolution. The credit goes to VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for PCs, released in 1979 for Apple II. Launched a few years later, Lotus 1-2-3 became even more popular in the 1980s – until Microsoft came with Excel.
In India, we were sheltered from all this until the mid-1980s. Though IBM PC was launched in the US in 1981, having a PC was a luxury most Indian companies, never mind homes, could ill afford. While I had read about the PC revolution and spreadsheets, it was only in 1984 that I came across an ad in the Times of India from an IT consulting company that was offering spreadsheet training. I was then a group product manager in a healthcare company and was curious to know more.
Spread the love between the sheets
I enrolled and learnt about the magic of PC spreadsheets. Since I didn’t have a PC, it seemed at first a wasteful exercise. But a few weeks later, we had our annual sales meetings and budgets that were agreed upon by regional managers had to be broken up into month-wise, state-wise numbers for around 90 stock-keeping units (SKUs).
This exercise was usually assigned to an expert who used to come to our office with his adding machine and work on this for a full week. (Our computer centre was busy with accounting tasks.) These numbers were checked after he was done. RMs were sent detailed budget documents a week later.
I stuck my neck out and offered to do state-wise and month-wise analysis with the help of the PC spreadsheet consultant. Clerks who managed these numbers were not ready to believe that this task could be completed in a day. Neither were their managers. But detailed budget sheets did come back from the consultant the next day, much to the shock of RMs and clerks. To be on the safe side, the ‘adding machine man’ was asked to do the same job. Fortunately for me, he found no mistakes in the data spat out by the PC spreadsheet.
Arguably, spreadsheets were the single-most important application to be used on a PC for many years. This, too, may change now. Soon we’ll be able to tell an AI system to pull the data down from a database, analyse it the way we want, and present the final results.
As the use of data becomes more and more ubiquitous, spreadsheets may give way to more interesting configurations of data — data cube, data lake, data hexagon? Let me leave you pondering over that as you prepare for your Sunday spread.