The true origins of these spreadsheets go back to 1978. A Harvard MBA student disliked the tedium of using a calculator to tote up columns and rows of interrelated numbers; it was boring even with a pocket calculator. A change in just one number could throw off dozens of other entries, so imagine the brain-numbing effect of making an error and then having to recalculate an entire spreadsheet. Why not write a computer program to alter all the other variables if one changed?
And so was born the electronic spreadsheet; it and word processing are the single most popular uses of microcomputers—the real justifications for their existence. A VisiCalc-type spreadsheet can add, subtract, multiply, average, do partial sums, find minimums, maximums, simplify your life in a number of ways.
A description of VisiCalc in CPA Micro Report ticks off an awesome number of applications: “sales forecasts, profit and loss statements, rate-of-return calculations, project scheduling, tax calculation, pricing strategies, financial planning, loan amortization, league standings and report generation.” An electronic spreadsheet can help do your checkbook; or it can assist in the preparation of a small country’s budget—which, in fact, has happened.
Some even say that spreadsheets are contributing to the paperwork deluging American business. VisiCalc coauthor Dan Bricklin disagrees. “A lot of calculations,” he said of the pre-VisiCalc days, “were being done on the backs of envelopes or corners of envelopes or the corners of newspapers. VisiCalc isn’t causing people to produce more numbers and reports. Those numbers were always there, but they weren’t always being identified.”[[28]]
“Multiplan is incredible,” Bowie said of his VisiCalc-style software. “I have generated budgets to see if they’ll do all I want them to, to consider all the what ifs.
“And it’s a big help in scheduling production. We have a factory producing cabinets for our homes, and our scheduling system is critical, since at most it can produce cabinets for only fifteen units a week.” The cabinet plant manager, caught between the demands of Washington Homes’ northern and southern divisions, had scheduled production according to his own whims.
“It was costing us a lot of money in missed settlements,” said Bowie, “and cabinets were not delivered, or they were the wrong color and size.” He was talking in late February, telling how, the other day, he had loaded in thirty-five more cabinet orders and instantly learned “we were out to April 15 on cabinet deliveries. That’s the soonest we could get them based on the plant’s production capabilities. I’m meeting with the manager this morning to see if in the future he can up his output. I’ve found that everybody’s got to live with lead times. Everybody’s got to give us the right lead time on orders, which means we are now ordering cabinets for delivery at the end of April and May, where we generally in the past would not have ordered May delivery until April. If I miss five house deliveries in a month because of cabinets not being there on time, then that’s ,000 to $5,000 in carrying charges over the next three to five months.”
Similarly, Multiplan was probably saving Bowie several thousand dollars more over the same period by “identifying houses not started because building permits have not been issued. And it will help identify the reasons why they haven’t been.
“To get a building permit, all sorts of things must fall into place. And now we can look at any particular job at any particular time, and if we see it isn’t started, find out why the permit hasn’t been issued.
“We can determine if we’re waiting for site plans or a plumbing permit or electrical permit or whatever it happened to be and instantly target and solve that problem.