SPREADSHEET LOTUS 123 SOFTWARE
And because there was very little management software available back then, they probably were the first dashboard reports created for personal computers. I’m sure that my Lotus mini-graph reports were the first dashboard reports ever created for spreadsheets. These days, with the growing popularity of dashboards, I’ve occasionally wondered what “firsts” I can claim with regard to spreadsheet dashboard reports. Today in Excel we can create a similar effect with colored bars in a bar or column chart.
![spreadsheet lotus 123 spreadsheet lotus 123](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/E6P8M3/a-lotus-1-2-3-release-31-spreadsheet-program-diskette-E6P8M3.jpg)
Back then, “Black” would correspond to red in a traffic light display, and “White” would correspond to green. It’s the third figure from the left in the bottom row.” These days, I tend to use numbers rather than labels, but either method works.įigure M above uses “Gray” as we would use yellow in a traffic light display today. When you want to open a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, you must first convert the files to the Excel format. In meetings, I found it much easier to say, “Look at figure O”, rather than “Look at the number of employees. Providing the VSE Script Server is running on the same workstation as your spreadsheet, you can now press Execute Script and the data is transferred from the VSAM cluster into the Lotus Spreadsheet as shown in Figure 2. Today, we would call it a dashboard report.Įven though this report is more than 30 years old, it contains several elements that I still use in my dashboards today, as this close-up illustrates:Įach figure in the example above begins with a single-character title - here, M, N, and O - to make it easy to refer to a figure during conversation. I called this report a Mini Graph Management Report. Today, of course, Excel dashboards are much more powerful and much easier to use than Lotus was. But 1-2-3, like Excel in its early days, offered no way to print more than one “real” chart per page. Lotus 1-2-3 was a spreadsheet program developed by Lotus Software, which is now part of IBM, and was first released on January 26, 1983. Yes, Lotus did have a rudimentary charting system. This work was necessary because that was the only way back then to create one report with many small charts. Using Excel terminology, each line of each chart used the REPLACE, REPT, and LEFT functions to generate those characters. The report created its graphs with characters.
SPREADSHEET LOTUS 123 FREE
It seems that we may be embarking on another turn of events with the availability of free web hosted applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho Office. I worked on this reporting technique in the early 1980s, then included this report in my first book, Financial Modeling Using Lotus 1-2-3, published by Sybex McGraw-Hill in 1986. Lotus 1 2 3 and Excel each associated themselves with different systems which in turn determined their place in the market for the next two decades. Lotus 1-2-3 later released a graphical user interface version of their spreadsheet, however, with the popularity of Microsoft Excel it did not gain wide acceptance.
SPREADSHEET LOTUS 123 WINDOWS 10
This is the first dashboard report ever created with spreadsheets. I installed windows 10 one month ago and 123 (Version 9. Lotus 1-2-3 was a popular command line spreadsheet program in the 1980s designed by Mitchell Kapor and released on January 26, 1983, by Lotus Software, which is now part of IBM.