Was Excel once a creative product?

2022-08-05 Daniel General, Improving your Creativity, Infrastructure, Inspiration, Other Programs, Realizing Creative Projects, Tools 0

«Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.»
Ronald Coase

I hate, hate, hate Excel with the power of an imploding star (given it sucks as much), but it’s easy to forget that Excel was once … a creative product? At least judging from this advertisement:

Different times.

Hmmm, and I wonder which value these sheets have, given how they were done. But that’s Excel for you — a torture chamber for data.

A comment for those seeking to use this site for personal gain: Given the increase in requests, let me be clear. I write on this blog because I want to. It’s my hobby, my playground. Sometimes people point me to interesting products/services and I write about them. But any request regarding ads or sponsored placements ends up the trash without a reply. And if you think something would be of interest, differentiate yourself from the spammers by referring to a posting — in an intelligent way. (I get enough auto-generated mails to identify them immediately.)

BTW, posts can get updated after I published them if I spot spelling errors (not a native speaker) or think a different wording might improve precision and clarity.

This blog is not focused on a single topic, or method. As long as it is relevant to improving creativity (or allowing it in the first place), it's fair game.
Some postings on this blog deal with freedom, as I think that we need freedom of thought, of speech, of association, etc. pp. to solve mankind's problems. Thus, some postings may seem a bit remote when it comes to organizing creativity. Freedom is, however, the bedrock of creativity.
The heterogeneity of the postings can make reading this blog a bit cumbersome, at least if you are only interested in one topic. You can either use the search function (above), or use the categories or the tags to narrow down the postings you see.

ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

How to generate, capture, and collect ideas to realize creative projects.

Was Excel once a creative product?