Spreadsheet Demo May 1987-Excel-Trapeze

It’s Thanksgiving Day in Canada, so some of us will be eating turkey and watching football. However, we don’t limit ourselves to one day, like the USA – we celebrate for three days!

Tomorrow, eight feet of snow will fall, and we’ll stay inside for the rest of the winter. 😉

Computer Chronicles 1987

For those of you who don’t have football to watch today, here’s a program that you might find interesting.

It’s an episode of Computer Chronicles from May 1987, with the guests talking about two types of spreadsheets — Microsoft Excel, and Trapeze.

An Excel Demo

The episode starts with a discussion of “look and feel” and related lawsuits. Then, at the 8:00 mark in the program, the Excel demo starts, with Mike Slade from Microsoft, using a Macintosh.

He shows multiple worksheets open at the same time, links the sheets, creates a chart, and runs something called a macro.

This link will take you to a few seconds before the Excel demo starts.

I’m sure some of you started in Excel on the Mac, like I did, and this presentation will take you back to the good old days.

Microsoft Excel Demo multiple worksheets 1987
Microsoft Excel Demo multiple worksheets 1987

A Trapeze Demo

The Excel demo lasts about 3 minutes, then Andrew Wulf, from Data Tailor, shows his company’s Trapeze spreadsheet.

Trapeze is a freeform spreadsheet, and it can do charts in colour! (We did not have colour on our old Mac computer!)

I wondered what happened to Trapeze, and found a blog post by Andrew Wulf.

In the article, he reports that Apple’s Numbers program is similar to the old Trapeze program.

Since I haven’t used either program, I’ll take his word for it!

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