Reading Marco’s post on spreadsheets, some old memories were resumed on my mind. On his analysis, Marco missed to cite the very first application implementing the conceps and interface now found on Quatrix and Flexisheet: Lotus Improv.

I have never had a great experience using spreadsheets; my only relevant exposure to cells has been during a laboratory assignment in the first year of university, when we had to build a very simple graphical spreadsheet, just to make some practice with the topological sorting algorith.

I have never used neither VisiCalc, nor Lotus 123 and forget about Excel, at least until very recently. And don’t dare to ask me what a “pivot” is, because I will start talking about basketball players.

But when I first saw Lotus Improv running on a NeXT workstation on an university laboratory, I was blown away and I immediately realized that this new paradigm was a great step forward from the classical, static grid, approach first introduced by VisiCalc.

Improv allowed the user to play with numbers in a very intuitive an constructive way, taking off al the boring operations, and bringing back the joy of searching for valuable relationships between the numbers.

I probably still have the four 1.44 floppy disks with the installer of the Windows 3.1 version of the demo of Improv 1.0 hidden in some box, but never thrown away.

Even if I have never needed to use a spreadsheet since then, I have always been disappointed by the “evolution” taken by this kind of tools, from Improv to Excel. To me this looks like a huge step backwards.

Excel was released before Improv, but according to this prospect, the first “popular” version of Excel (v4.0) was released in 1992. And this is what Improv looked like, in an advertise found on the winter 1992 issue of NeXTWorld:

I think Apple could make itself and all its users a huge favor “adopting” Flexisheet, bringing it to a complete state and integrating it within its iWork suite of productivity applications. The improvements this application could potentially bring to the table are huge; and it would be another little tile posed into place to take Office to obsolescence.