Excel Was NOT ‘Originally Designed as a Personal Productivity Tool’

If you read the business press or Business Intelligence (BI) forums, or if you listen to most IT managers, you’ll soon hear that “Excel was originally designed as a personal productivity tool.”

Well, it ain’t true!

I know this “fact” isn’t true for three reasons.

First, I was there at the beginning. In the mid 1980s I worked as a columnist for Inc, Business Software, and LOTUS magazines. So when Business Software assigned me to write a cover story about the introduction of Excel for the PC, Microsoft was happy to cooperate. They allowed me to spend an entire afternoon with the manager of the Excel project.

At that point, Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the marketplace. Microsoft’s only goal was to offer a spreadsheet that was technically superior to Lotus 1-2-3, and easier to use. Excel was “originally designed” to kill Lotus 1-2-3. And a significant part of their strategy was to delight the business market.

Second, VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Symphony, Multiplan, and Excel all were designed and promoted as business-management tools, not merely as personal productivity tools. To illustrate what everybody knew about spreadsheets back then, here are some titles of books that I still have on my shelf from those early years of the spreadsheet:

• The Power of VisiCalc Real Estate (1981)
  
• Doing Business With VisiCalc (1982)
• VisiCalc, Advanced Version, Worksheets for Business (1983)
• Multiplan Models for Business (1983)
• Solving Marketing Problems With VisiCalc (1984)
• 1-2-3 Managerial Worksheets (1984)
• Business Worksheets for Lotus 1-2-3 (1984)
  
• 1-2-3 for Business (1984)
• A 1-2-3 Business User’s Guide, Planning and Budgeting for Higher Profits (1984)
  
• Preparing Your Business Plan with Symphony (1985)
  
• Advanced Business Models with 1-2-3 (1985)
• Salesbook Spreadsheets (1985)
• Money Management Worksheets for 1-2-3 / Symphony (1985)
• Marketing Mix Analysis with Lotus 1-2-3 (1986)
• Controlling Your Cash Flow with 1-2-3 or Symphony (1986)
  
• Business Statistics Using Lotus 1-2-3 (1987)
  
• Business Planning & Forecasting with Microsoft Excel (1988)
• Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.2 for Accounting (1989)
  

Also, of course, there are my own two books from that era:

• Financial Modeling Using Lotus 1-2-3 (1986)
• Microsoft Excel Business Sourcebook (1990)

The third reason I know that Excel was not originally designed as a “personal productivity tool” is that the first statement I can find on Google about this idea — which supposedly has been around from Excel’s beginning — doesn’t appear until 2006. The statement was in an article in Search Data Management, which quoted Robert Kugel of Ventana Research. If you’re not familiar with him, Kugel probably is the most widely quoted trivializor of Excel.

So if a BI vendor or your IT people try to trivialize Excel by saying it was “originally designed as a personal productivity tool”, don’t let them get away with it. The statement ain’t true!

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