On the 40th birthday of Microsoft Excel, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, discuss the impact (for better and worse) the program has had on the accounting profession and small businesses. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, welcome
Randy Johnston 00:11
to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, we want to have another little look back session with you today on Excel, who’s experiencing a 40th anniversary this year. Now, Excel was born or released on september 30, 1985 so you know, if you think about the evolution of the product, it is amazing how far it’s come. It was very clunky in a black and white system in the earliest of days. And as it turns out, it had to run in DOS in those days for obvious reasons. But you know the bottom line here is today, this is the go to spreadsheet for around 1.1 billion people. And just for the record, it actually started its life on the Apple Computer lines. So you know, that’s not really what most people would expect. But, you know, Microsoft had an earlier spreadsheet product which I used. It was actually a very interesting design called multi plan. And multi plan actually would allow multiple sheets and so forth. But it was pretty clear that by november of 1984 that Bill Gates wanted to have some sort of a replacement for this older multi plan. And interestingly enough, the release for Excel was a little classy, done at Tavern on the green in New York, which was an exclusive event for the Apple Macintosh. So many people don’t remember the the approaches that was done there, but you know, XL first one was relatively simple, but it already contains some of the same features that you use today. For example, users could create complex tables, and they could use the systems to perform calculations and sort data and even do some simple graphs. And even though the graphs look pretty clunky by today’s standard, they’re pretty easy to use. And by the time we evolved to version two of the system in 1987 which I think Brian’s showing you a bit of a screenshot on it was, it was becoming a pretty useful product. Now, of course, there was a little competitor out there that, you know, I can still use in my sleep. And I think Brian, you can too, Lotus, 123,
02:38
Flash, PPA, G, enter.
Randy Johnston 02:40
That’s exactly the one I was going to use. So now I have to pick another command. But and point of disclosure, we did our k2 group did work for Lotus Development Corporation, and did a lot of the design work on 123, and many of you remember partners will Fleener in particular, who was really known as the Lotus guru. He really could make the products sing. But the software, Lotus 123, was specifically designed to work on IBM’s personal computers, very sophisticated for its time, also another motivation for Microsoft to build a competitor. Now, as it turns out, we had the good fortune of working with several different product managers on Excel. Dorothy Lou is the one that always comes to mind for me, because I can still picture as I’m describing it to you right now, sitting in a conference room in Redmond with Dorothy Lou and about a dozen developers, as we were talking about how we could make Excel competitive with Lotus, 123, and it was in that meeting we did we designed the Accounting format. So, you know, I basically explained how it had to work. The other Ketu guys were explaining the capabilities as well. And of course, for those of you who may not remember this, I’m an old, hardcore programmer, and I’m looking at what it would take to write it. And of course, the programmers are saying nobody would ever use that. Nobody wants this thing. We didn’t call it Accounting format at the time, but nobody wants a space on the right and wants to put parentheses around numbers. Nobody needs that.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:27
If, God forbid, your comments should line up,
Randy Johnston 04:30
also a problem, right? So as it turns out, this new Excel was quite a breakthrough. But the other big breakthrough, and this is a marketing strategy that I I’m sure is out from under non disclosure at this point. But it turns out Lotus 123, had a key disk. And to run Lotus 123, this locking disk had to be used. It had. Be inserted into the drive. And there were a lot of softwares that broke that, which would be an illegal break, by the way, but lots of people did it well. I came up with, and I’m going to use the word I, because I’m the one that did it. Came up with a strategy for Microsoft to actually sell not only excel, but the whole Microsoft Office Suite for less than one copy of lotus, 123, and it could be installed on your network and could be used by an unlimited number of users at the one, low, low, low price. Well, it didn’t take very long for, you know, a lot of users in corporate America, in specific to say, Huh, we can buy one copy of Microsoft Office, put it on our network, and we don’t have to license all this word perfect and Lotus, 123, and whatnot, and everybody graphics Absolutely. I loved Harvard, first before PowerPoint, way before PowerPoint, and still, frankly, had better features than we have in PowerPoint today, just for the record, but, and there were many others of those presentation tools that I used to but the bottom line was, everybody knew the price would go up once we, you know, started buying this in volume. So it was a short term marketing strategy, but it worked. And by early 1990 I believe it was Excel overtook 123, as the most popular spreadsheet software. Now, a lot of people continue using lotus, 123, for a long time,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:34
but I’ll say that. I will say that low that Excel didn’t exist at Coopers and Lybrand when I was there through 1995 and you know the I will just say that the load Excel, I remember I used it a little bit in college, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t get past how weird it was, because I was so used to does a calc before that, before I used Lotus 123, and once I started using Lotus 123, I didn’t want to have anything to do with Excel, because it was what I knew. And that’s the same way the accounting professional was we. We came to excel kicking and screaming, like we do to many software transitions.
Randy Johnston 07:18
Well. So you know, I guess one other thing that is notable to point out, particularly since you’ve got that graphic up for Excel 95 many of the Microsoft products had easter eggs in them. The Windows operating systems and excel did too. And in Excel 95 if you found the Easter egg, you could actually play a video game called the Hall of tortured souls. It was very fascinating, because this trend continued in Excel 1997 which actually had a version of flight simulator in it. And of course, Excel 1997 also, unfortunately introduced Clippy. So there’s some versions of Clippy that are back with us at this point. But this period of time, as we were evolving for the year 2000 was very, very significant in terms of the evolution of the platform, the capabilities and so forth. And we did a beautiful amount of work with Microsoft in that time. But in any case, the evolution continued from there. Brian, so, you know, I think for our listeners and viewers, it may be wise just to think then with Excel, because again, I’m just going to reiterate the numbers a little bit. But early on, they were just numbered, you know, 1234, and then, when we got to 1995, it was Excel, 95 then 97 and 2002 1003 or was it two, sorry, two and then over 2007 then 10, Then 13, then 16, then 19. And really today, Microsoft would love to bury those numbers with, you know, office 95 Microsoft 95 but for you, Brian, and I know you teach a lot of Excel, and you’re, you know, a strong expert at Excel as well. What would you say are the significant breakthrough for our accountants?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:21
You know, I would suggest that probably the first one would have been the early versions of Excel did multiple sheets, which was something that that Lotus, 123, didn’t do. Well, there was actually a feature back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth called a was it was a workspace or something like that, and you could save multiple sheets open at once. I will say that, you know, start pivot tables really changed my life when I started using them about 9596 I remember using them on a little on a computer that had a nine inch screen. It was a color screen, okay, back then, and it was my. First, first computer I ever had that had a had a color screen on it. I don’t think people can really appreciate how revolutionary it was, because the my first year, year or so at Coopers, we actually did everything on five, seven and 14 column paper. And, you know, just that was how it was done. And so it was a huge shift toward the end, when they we switched over to this digital work paper system called class that was based on Lotus Notes. And it was a huge change. Now, looking back though, at spreadsheets, the next thing I would say is that’s probably a pretty big deal would be templates. That’s something that that really helped me a lot in in through my career, you know. And then I, you know, I’m probably skipping some things here, but I think Power Query is a very, very big deal for accountants, just because it gives you a set of tools you can use to do ETL that doesn’t require programming ETL, of course, is Extract, Transform, load, when you’re getting data out of one system into another and getting it to interface, you know. And there are, there are many other things that we could talk about, macros, you know, the ability to, I don’t know then, the ability to save things in the cloud and share them with other people. There’s just a ton of things that we could talk about here, but, but again, there are, I think we all come back to spreadsheets. And, you know, I saw, I see this in the the all the surveys I see on the accounting profession, because account accountants, you know, 97% of the accountants are using real Excel, as opposed to Google Sheets or Zoho, Zoho sheets or some other tool like that. And it’s not, you know, it’s, I don’t think it’s that those tools can’t do most of the things that accountants need to do, and accountants don’t like to change, obviously, but the cloud based spreadsheets just haven’t quite kept up with the size this, the size limitations and some other things like that in there that that We have, I will say that it is a, I think, you know, the cloud version is getting better and better every day. I actually have a Linux box that I use a lot of the time. And I’m, I’m getting used to doing Excel, that is, that is fully in the web browser on there, because I don’t have, you know, there is, there isn’t a office for Linux, and so it’s a it’s a wonderful thing that I can still use that, even though I’m not using Windows. But I think that Excel is just part and parcel of what we do in accounting, and I think it’s one of those things that we’re going to be dealing with for at least another 1020, years, if not much longer
Randy Johnston 13:00
well, and even though there are many in the profession that would like to see spreadsheets eliminated, I don’t see an easy way to do that in the near term and possibly even the long term. You know, if you’re building a prototype, it often starts there, and as you were describing the things that were important to you, again, there are hundreds, literally 1000s of features inside Excel today, just like there are in Word or PowerPoint. But I think it’s instructive to note that from roughly 1995 on, so for the last 30 years, the top 10 features requested in Excel already exist in the product. And so there’s a lot to learn. And the problem is, many of you don’t know the features. You don’t know what you don’t know, as the old phrase goes, but I am very pleased with the evolution of the platform, its performance, its capabilities, and so forth. So Well, we wanted to have that little nostalgic walk with you, because if you didn’t remember this is Excel 40th anniversary. I just want to know what gift you’re going to buy. That’s kind of the deal. But we appreciate you listening in. We’ll talk to you again soon in another technology accounting lab. All the best to you today.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:14
I think I’m going to buy Clippy about white out, but we’ll see what works.
Randy Johnston 14:19
Sounds good, bro, thanks.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:21
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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