Time for a history lesson in spreadsheet history with AI taking over all this stuff. I wanted to go back in time before AI and understand what made spreadsheets spreadsheets. Who made spreadsheets spreadsheets? Here is an account from the people who made spreadsheets, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, but you might not know the other faces, but you will by the end of this. You have to go to bettersheets.co/history and find out what happened to spreadsheets from ancient accounting. Why spreadsheets might not have ever actually been spreadsheets. There's a chance that actually spreadsheets could have just been ledgers, immutable ledgers, which actually is more like Bitcoin than actual spreadsheets. Accountants took an appendon kind of thing, except someone wanted to edit one thing and edit a lot of things and see

that edit in real time and be able to edit a lot of stuff. So why spreadsheets are spreadsheets now is because of a lot of people and this geeks out on spreadsheets. I was interested in the fact that spreadsheet used to be two words. There was a hyphenated version, there was an unhyenated version and only in 1965 did the spreadsheet as a single word start being used in computing. We go through all of the people who pioneered everything from LANPAR to Vizyal 40 years ago. There are some features in Vizelk that are not in current spreadsheets. Now the creator of Vizyalc wanted to create a spreadsheet essentially that looked like a fighter pilot console. It was interesting to hear from the creators of Vizyalc and

understand what they put into one of the original spreadsheet software. After Vizycal was out, tons of copycats. This is a recreation of Dan Bicklin in his MBA class and wondering why can't we just edit these things and all of the edits happen automatically. This was the original Visyal. You can use Viscal today. There are emulators but I created one in Google Sheets. Go to bettershets.co/history and check it out. Excel was established in 19. We talk about features we've mostly lost like R1c1 notation . We use A1 notation now in Appscript. I use R1 C1 notation . There is a reason why we have columns A, B, C, D. It was because we wanted to get away from two numbers and have a different

system for the columns than the rows. In 19 you were limited to 32,767 rows in Excel . Now we're talking about limits of almost 20 million cells in frontier uses of Google Sheets. Currently, it's around 2 to 5 million. Your Google sheet will start to slow down, but there was a limit at one point to 32,000. The cloud changed everything. That's why we have now Google Sheets. Google Sheets is web-based spreadsheet software and the cloud is why we have Google Sheets and not only Excel anymore. I wonder what AI is going to do to Google Sheets. AI has been in Google Sheets since 2016. We're right on the cusp of a new age of energy and I wonder what's going to change. But we can look at what changed from 2016. How did they

implement it then? There's more than two billion users of Google Sheets, a billion users of Excel . 2.5 billion Macintosh devices that have Apple numbers. This is a graph of the use of the word spreadsheet as two words. You can see it's increased, but the absolute increase over that of the word spreadsheet as one word in the 80s and has not looked back. Spreadsheet is two words had a run for 200 years, but it's spreadsheet as one words chance now. Here's the landscape of spreadsheets. The big three and the challengers including air table , notion, koda, rows, CRM trying to redo spreadsheets. No code builders are using spreadsheets as a database. And there's automation platforms including Google's

own appscript and app sheet. There are a ton of opportunities that even AI is still missing. And I'm really excited about the spreadsheets future with a grid is 50 years old. Your spreadsheet work you do is today. You need it done. Join Better Sheets as a member and get the most out of your spreadsheets