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Spreadsheet Championships

13

Comments

  • cfw1994
    cfw1994 Posts: 2,166 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Hung up my suit! Name Dropper
    How often do you back up your sheets? I also got the Google spreadsheet, which I monitor my numbers but the thought of losing access is always at the back of my mind,
    Google drive itself is protected - it has version history.
    If I make major changes that concerned me I might break things badly, I would make a copy myself - either the entire sheet (save a version as [name - original], for example), or just copy the worksheet & work there.

    I used to use excel, but paying the Microsoft £££ didn’t feel conducive to my retirement goals of minimising the monthlies, so I have ditched that - I already pay google for photo management and storage, so this slipped in well.  Plus Microsoft had provided my tech career with enough pain to mentally make me want to ditch them 😂

    I’ve had big success on just importing my old useful excel things into google.

    The only one I had some trouble with led me to trying libreoffice, & I now use that for an annual diary - a quick reference “what’s on in 2025” sort of thing.  Tbh, I could have kludged gsheets to sort of work, but libreoffice is decent.
    Plan for tomorrow, enjoy today!
  • leosayer
    leosayer Posts: 706 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 500 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    I've been using Google Sheets for over 10 years.

    At first it was pretty basic and a poor relation to Excel which I used daily at work. I used to hate working with web-based spreadsheets but now it's just as good as one installed on your pc.

    Sheets now has pretty much everything you could need such as advanced functions, complex charting, the ability to embed SQL queries and web requests. Opening excel sheets is no problem.

    On top of that it's part of Google Drive which includes all the file storage, versioning, sharing and multiple device support. 
  • EdSwippet
    EdSwippet Posts: 1,671 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    cfw1994 said:
    How often do you back up your sheets? I also got the Google spreadsheet, which I monitor my numbers but the thought of losing access is always at the back of my mind,
    Google drive itself is protected - it has version history.
    Well, yes. But. Aren't we all just one Truth Social or X rant away from losing access to every Google service? A locally stored set of backups (ods, xslx) as well is no bad thing.
  • af1963
    af1963 Posts: 425 Forumite
    Fourth Anniversary 100 Posts Name Dropper
    If we're reminiscing about spreadsheets from ancient history, I learned on the Ability Plus integrated package on DOS-based PCs in the late 80s, and the first one I used in a working environment was part of DEC's "All-in-1"  mainframe-based integrated suite, which was used in quite a few large corporate clients.
  • cfw1994
    cfw1994 Posts: 2,166 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Hung up my suit! Name Dropper
    EdSwippet said:
    cfw1994 said:
    How often do you back up your sheets? I also got the Google spreadsheet, which I monitor my numbers but the thought of losing access is always at the back of my mind,
    Google drive itself is protected - it has version history.
    Well, yes. But. Aren't we all just one Truth Social or X rant away from losing access to every Google service? A locally stored set of backups (ods, xslx) as well is no bad thing.
    For now, luckily, the owners of TS & X are quite different to Google….but your point is well made.  
    It is very easy to take a local downloaded backup in a different format (eg, download to .xls) as a belt’n’braces, if you are so minded 👍

    As for reminiscing, don’t get me started on my SuperCalc V spreadsheet to dynamically score a car treasure hunt back in the 80s…..each question had the same points available as cars, so if we had 10, and only one got it right, they got 10 points….if they all got it right, 1 point each…..kept the thing very exciting up to the last car coming in 😂
    All on a huge laptop with a tiny screen!
    Plan for tomorrow, enjoy today!
  • 1987, using Lotus 1-2-3 and Paradox, linked together by MS-DOS batch files and auto-execute macros to pass data between them. Ah, those were the days. If I’m not careful then I’ll get nostalgic for Novell Netware 3.11 as well !
  • Ibrahim5 said:
    Loved VisiCalc myself.
    On your TRS-80 ?
  • LHW99
    LHW99 Posts: 5,356 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    I seem to remember even the old BBC micro used to have a / some spreadsheet programs available. It certainly had a word processor on ROM.
  • LHW99 said:
    I seem to remember even the old BBC micro used to have a / some spreadsheet programs available. It certainly had a word processor on ROM.
    ViewSheet ?
  • Moonwolf
    Moonwolf Posts: 519 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    1987, using Lotus 1-2-3 and Paradox, linked together by MS-DOS batch files and auto-execute macros to pass data between them. Ah, those were the days. If I’m not careful then I’ll get nostalgic for Novell Netware 3.11 as well !
    I used Paradox and DataEase.

    On Netware I remember having to go round and edit the autoexec.bat on machines as netx took a lot of memory to load but then the tsr was relatively small, I needed to make sure it loaded first before the keyboard and mouse drivers or it would fail to load. Then there was stuff that would load into upper memory and stuff that wouldn’t. Sort of a pain, but also I knew every single executable on most PCs.
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