A winning formula

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Freshen up your formulas and pamper those pivot tables—International Spreadsheet Day is Oct. 17.

On this day in 1979, a computer program called VisiCalc first shipped for the Apple II, marking the birth of the electronic spreadsheet. A few years later, Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC had its moment, and then Microsoft Excel became the dominant spreadsheet program, which it remains today.

The spreadsheet was the original killer app—the thing that convinced many people to buy a computer for the first time. Conceived as a simple scratchpad, the now-ubiquitous tool is used to compile everything from grocery lists to multinational company accounts. Its incredible flexibility makes it both powerful and dangerous, loved and loathed in equal measure.

fun fact

Other names the founders of VisiCalc—short for “visible calculator”—considered: Electroledger, Calculedger, Calcupaper, and Compulator.

download this!

The version of VisiCalc released for the IBM PC in 1981 will still run on modern Windows machines. It weighs in at a scant 27.5 kilobytes and can be downloaded here.

hard cell

When the sheet hits the fan

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Spreadsheets are easy to make, and even easier to make badly. In one study, researchers at Dartmouth got access to live spreadsheets from a group of companies. Depressingly, they found that only a third were error-free: Many were minor, but some skewed numbers by as much as $100 million. The list of costly Excel-based snafus is long and cringe-worthy. Here are few doozies:

• The opaque, error-prone system of risk reporting via spreadsheets at JPMorgan allowed a trader known as the “London whale” to rack up more than $6 billion in losses.
• A spreadsheet formula error led economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff to overstate the effects of government debt in an influential paper used by many to justify austerity policies.
• A single mistaken cell entry led organizers of London’s 2012 Olympics to overbook the synchronized swimming events by 10,000 tickets.
• Years of genomics research is riddled with errors because Excel and other popular spreadsheet applications converted some gene symbols to dates and numbers—like turning the gene MARCH1 into “03/01/2016.”

=CONCATENATE =AGGREGATE =IMCONJUGATE =APPROXIMATE

Correct.

Incorrect.

If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.

quotable

“Take her back to the crib and spreadsheets / ‘Cuz I Microsoft Excel in the bedsheets”

—lyrics from “Outside” by Rtillery

Back to the future

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In 1863, Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century , a prescient work of speculative fiction. The dystopian capital he imagined 100 years in the future was in thrall to greedy financiers, all-powerful corporations, and pervasive automation (“machines advantageously replacing human hands”).

Office workers were slaves to calculating machines that “looked rather like huge pianos.” The “Great Ledger,” as he described it, was a sort of steampunk proto-spreadsheet:

“…by operating a sort of keyboard, sums were instantaneously produced, remainders, products, quotients, rules of proportion, calculations of amortization and of interest compounded for infinite periods and at all possible rates. There were high notes which afforded up to one hundred fifty percent!”

take me down this 🐰 hole!

“A virtual cult of the spreadsheet has formed, complete with gurus and initiates, detailed lore, arcane rituals – and an unshakable belief that the way the world works can be embodied in rows and columns of numbers and formulas.”

— Steven Levy, “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge,” Harper’s, 1984

Love them! Hate them! Love to hate them! A life without pivot tables is not worth living.

the fine print

In yesterday’s poll about the kilonova, 84% of you said you were “humbled by the awesomeness of the universe.” 🌠

Today’s email was reported and written by Jason Karaian.

Images: Certiport (Dumoulin)