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Since i was probably 10 or 12, I have used spreadsheets. I used them to calculate my Boy Scout Troops budget, campout costs, army men logistics, game optimizations (before complex video games and cheat codes), coffee expenses, and, of course, business.

Here is a history of my glory days, the fall from grace and the redemption of my spreadsheet soul.

My first time on a spreadsheet was AdamCalc. It was included on Coleco’s Adam. It was very slow and did not have realtime calculations. You would type in your formulas and then hit the recalc option and wait. A complex spreadsheet would take a few minutes to calculate. It did however have almost every function I ever use today. It was easy to use, just slow and the interface was horrible. It was on a normal TV screen after all.

The next transition was due to a little computer we bought called the Macintosh SE. To this day I wish I had kept that computer, it was terrific. I used a early version of Excel for the Mac. It was so much nicer that the clunky AdamCalc. My spreadsheets looked beautiful on the little 9″ black and white screen. After a few years of using Excel, Claris released a program called Clarisworks. It was a combination word processor and spreadsheet program. It was much easier to use than Excel, I could combine a letter and a spreadsheet which seemed revolutionary at the time.

So I dumped Excel for the first time. Clarisworks became Appleworks and it was my workhorse for a decade. During this time, in 1995, I took on the task of treasurer for my fraternity. I decided to try out double entry, manual bookkeeping in a old ledger. It was fun, in a dorky way, but it was a valuable experience. I would stick to computers to do all the heavy lifting from then on.

I had always bought a single copy of Office so we could open Word and Excel files. At some point Microsoft made it so no one could convert the file formats. I do not know why or when, but it always frustrated me. (They are not very customer friendly.)

In 2005, Appleworks was old and on the verge of being dropped by Apple. It was not OS X native and often corrupted my documents. So I jumped back to Excel. It was the version in Office 2004 for the Mac. I spent 3 years with Excel and never ‘got it.’ I always felt like I was always searching around and never really focusing on accomplishing anything. Maybe this why so many classes are offered in Office. It was so clunky and frustrating. I purchased about 7 copies of Office at $500 a pop :O to bring GetYourShirts.com up to date. Everyone complained and no one seemed to like it. They all preferred the decade old Appleworks. Word, by the way, was the focus of most people’s complaints. It’s default seetings makes it useless. “I JUST WANT TO TYPE A SIMPLE LETTER!” resounded through the cubicles. All of this continued for about 3 years. Also, Word and Excel are dog slow and have tons of “unexpectedly quit” and corruption of file problems. Clicking to Launch Word is an excuse to take a long coffee break.

Robert was the first to try out the spreadsheet that came as part of the iWorks suite. For about a year, Robert told me how much better Pages (the word processor) and Numbers (the spreadsheet) were to Office. I said “How can this be when office is used by 99% of the planet and costs $500? It must be better, we just need to keep trying.”

In early 2008, I started the new pricing model which is my most intensive spreadsheet project I have ever undertaken. I decided to give Numbers a try, normally a bad choice to start a new software program on my largest project ever. Numbers was amazing! Manipulating the spreadsheet was easy and seemed to flow naturally like the way spreadsheet programs should. It had a awesome feature that won me over, sheets and tables. I could make individual little spreadsheets for each topic and visually arrange them. Each table could have its column width customized for the best view of the data. It kind of felt like a database setup with interlinked tables, instead of the monolithic super sheet that I had used in Excel. This was about 50 or so tables of data which was all interlinked. When I was done with one table, I could pass it to another sheet to clear the clutter. My spreadsheet has ended up much larger and more complex, which is good.

In Excel, I would have cut corners due to difficulty in managing a 4×6 foot spreadsheet with all wonky column widths and constantly breaking field references. Numbers is also very, very fast and responsive. It only costs $79! If only I had known, we could have saved so much money, at least I have had this realization before Office 2008 was available.

The only feature I’d like to see in Numbers, is a indicator you can toggle that shows fields that are linked to from other tables. I used labels, but i could have been automated in my opinion.