I was taking a class on media planning at SPJIMR and we were going through data tables after data tables. My students were struggling to keep pace with my changing and at times challenging questions. As they were almost getting ready to give up on the various spreadsheets, I gently told them that you can be thankful that you don’t have to struggle with multiple ‘double foolscap sheets’! ‘What is a double foolscap?’ was the quick question! I had to explain that double foolscap is a large sheet of paper with horizontal lines. 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 what we refer to as ‘cells’. Fill out the individual cells manually. Then do the calculation, cell by cell. These could take many hours or even many days. From there we have now reached a stage where even a high school student has become adept at handling [digital] spreadsheets.
Microsoft Excel entered its 40th year last month. And there are probably 400 million paid users of MS Excel around the world[The Economist 19 Oct 2024]. But it was not Excel that started the spreadsheet revolution. That credit goes to VisiCalc, built in 1979; launched a few years later, Lotus 1-2-3, became even more popular, till Microsoft came with its Excel.
In India we were quite sheltered from all this till the mid 1980s. Though IBM PC was launched in the US in 1981, having a PC was a luxury most Indian companies [forget homes] could ill afford. While I had read about the PC revolution and the 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. I enrolled and learnt about the magic of the PC spreadsheets. Since I did not have a PC on my table it seemed at first a wasteful exercise. But a few weeks later we had our annual sales meetings and the budgets that were agreed upon by the various regional managers had to be broken up into month-wise, state-wise numbers for around 90 SKUs. This exercise was usually assigned to an expert who used to come to our office with his ‘adding machine’ and worked on this for a full week [our computer center was busy with accounting tasks]. These numbers were checked after he was done. The regional managers were sent their detailed budget documents a week later.
I stuck my neck out that year and offered to do this statewise, monthwise analysis with the help of the PC spreadsheet consultant. The company’s clerks who managed these numbers were not ready to believe that this task could be completed in a day. Neither were their managers. But that was that. The detailed budget sheets came back from the consultant the next day much to the shock of the regional managers, and the clerks. To be on the safe side the ‘adding machine man’ was asked to do the same job and fortunately for me, he found no mistakes in the data spat out by the PC spreadsheet.
From learning to use a double foolscap spreadsheet and calculators, we moved to PC based spreadsheets 30+ years ago. Possibly spreadsheet was the single most important application to be used on a PC for many years. This too may change. Soon we will be able to tell an AI system to pull the data down from a database, analyze it the way we want and present the final results. As use of data becomes more and more ubiquitous, speadsheets may give way to more interesting configurations of data, a data-cube, a data-lake, a data-hexagon? Let me leave you pondering over that over your Sunday brunch.
Appeared originally in Economic Times 23 November 2024