Phil Oye

Despite Microsoft’s (completely valid) reputation of forcing bloatware down consumer’s throats, I have to say Excel is a damn fine application. While I don’t keep track of all the competing products out there, nor do I have a clue which, if any, of its features are original to Excel, I (cringe) credit Microsoft.

I realize that I’m talking about the original “killer app” for computers and this musing is probably 20 years too late. But in addition to all of the basic functionality that has been around since VisiCalc, three things make it a great application for me despite its bloated ways, rather than just a necessary one.

1. Autofilter. Once applied to the headings of a column, you can then filter which rows are shown based on just about any criteria. For example, only show rows where “category” equals “rent”.
2. Conditional sums. This lets you calculate a sum of values based on whether the corresponding values match a criteria. For example, “only sum these ‘amount’ cells if the corresponding ‘paid’ cell for each is true”.
3. Conditional formatting. Being the designer that I am, I can’t stand looking at spreadsheets where the only differentiation between values is type and style. With this function you can color the foreground or background of a cell based on it’s value. This allows me to do my best Tufte impression without busting out Illustrator.

There are probably a ton of other features that could be cool if I knew about them. But this is Excel we’re talking about, I can’t wade through all the bloat.

As is the case for just about any musing I write, I end up doing a google search on the topic at hand. Today’s search reveals Spreadsheet History, which includes a factoid that I was not aware of—Excel was first developed for the Mac 512k in 1984 and later ported to the PC. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.