Seeing Like a Spreadsheet

This is really two articles in one. First a (great) history of the spreadsheet.

Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.

This looks really good. Haven't read in full yet, but I was hoping to see him credit Ben Evans's "Office, messaging and verbs" (2015): "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person."

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...

I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/

A recent blog post from Christoper Drum on running Lotus 1-2-3 on MS-DOS in a 286 emulator https://stonetools.ghost.io/lotus123-dos/ .

Excel (e spreadsheets) is the best quantitative planning piece of software.

There is no other planning tool in the software industry that can answer “what if I changed that” as seamlessly as excel.

Planning is not about its absolute numbers but about its sensitivity to inputs and assumptions.

The rich and complex history of spreadsheets inspired me to build React Spreadsheet. Along the way I deepened (and others) understanding of the complexities and intricacies of spreadsheets https://iddan.github.io/react-spreadsheet

I wrote my first AI agent (well a backpropagation model, LOL) in Excel on Mac in 1988. It could only handle several thousand parameters. But it was very cool to see the model in operation.

This has interesting speculation on the future business impact of AI, extrapolated from Excel:

"This will be genuinely extraordinary for what organizations, particularly the best organizations, can achieve. But if each previous ideology of the corporation illuminated something real about its character and potential, each also, in the fullness of time, deformed it. The financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified; and the AI ideology, I suspect, will be blind to what cannot be made legible as a workflow."

Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people? Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.

I wrote this, hope people enjoy it!

> And yet you will struggle to find people who love the spreadsheet.

who doesn't love spreadsheets? the average corporate employee holds a death grip on google sheets even if you spend $1m on software that theoretically should keep them out of it.

i've seen countless instances across engineering/data, product, marketing, and recruiting where data is smuggled out of an HRIS/ATS/CRM/ERP to create static structure, improved personal tracking, note-taking, data analysis, realtime team collaboration, etc. all wrapped up in a mini database.

I really feel for Dan Bricklin. He should have been richly rewarded for his innovation.

Was anyone using a spreadsheet to drive automation for testing earlier than 1988?

I have some reason to believe my team was the first within Apple SQA to lean heavily into that, but I’d love to hear of earlier examples.