Hearts in Hawai'i
R.I.P. Lotus 1-2-3 (1991-2015)
5/12/2015
I was introduced to the world of spreadsheets in early 1991, when a batch of new PC's was delivered to our office. These were replacements of the old HP 150 PC's, which had no hard drive--they had a dual 3.5" floppy drive where you loaded the operating system in the left drive, booted it up, then replaced that disk with the program disk of whatever program you were using. Lotus 1-2-3 and Memomaker were the two primary programs we used at the time. You would do your work and save your files on another floppy loaded into the right drive. These new PC's, which contained the Intel 80286 chip (top of the line at the time!), actually had a hard drive with programs installed on the drive. These also had a dual floppy drive, except these had a 3.5" bay and a 5.25" bay.
Lotus was the program which intrigued me. It had no practical application in my job (at the time), but there was something about this program which screamed "possibilities!" at me. The idea of having individual "cells" where one would enter data, be it labels, numbers or formulas, made me think that Lotus had serious potential.
And so I asked the office Lotus "guru" (thank you, Larry T.!) to help me get started. Once started, I was hooked. The idea that you could change a number and automatically change what showed in any other cells which were dependent on this number was amazing. No more wearing out pencils and redoing worksheets all the time. It was magic, not to mention a huge time saver.
Again, there were no real practical applications for my job at the time. That time would eventually come. But for now, I was interested in this program from a purely personal standpoint. A lot of things I did at home (budgeting and the like) were cumbersome and tedious, requiring considerable time, not to mention filler paper. I could set up a spreadsheet, enter data, run formulas, and print out whatever I wanted to review. Besides, I hated to write out numbers. This was much easier!
And so began my love affair with Lotus.
The big breakthrough occurred later that year, when I attended a Dun & Bradstreet seminar on Lotus through work. The afternoon session was dedicated to a thing called "macros", whereby you could automate certain repetitive tasks. The fuse was lit, and I was now dedicated to becoming an expert Lotus user. Taking what little I learned in that seminar, I began to expand my knowledge through trial-and-error, and a whole lot of studying the official Lotus manual. Some people learn by doing, and I'm one of those people but there comes a time when nothing substitutes for good 'ole RTFM (Read The ******* Manual!).
In 1992, I purchased my first personal computer, a 386-based CompuAdd PC. This was, for its time, a speed machine, with four megs of RAM and a 120 Mb hard drive. I could save tons of files on this thing! Everything in my life which used to require paper and pen was now suitable for spreadsheet development--from personal stuff to finance to sports, any kind of statistics, you name it.
By now, I was using Lotus 3.1+ for DOS. Remember DOS? Most of us still do. Hell, I still use DOS when I want to create a text file based on the contents of a file directory. Nothing works quite like "C:\dir>[file name]" when I want to accomplish this.
But 3.1+ allowed me to set up multiple worksheets in the same file. Using the command /Worksheet-Global-Group-Enable, I could take formatting used in one sheet and apply it to every other sheet in a file. This was huge.
So, too, was the fact that Lotus was a keyboard based program. No mouse use was required for this program, which made entry and formatting of spreadsheets a breeze.
But trouble loomed on the horizon for Lotus. A new software program being pimped by Microsoft, Microsoft Excel, was making inroads and was starting to cut in to Lotus market share in a major way. Within a couple years, Excel would be the spreadsheet of choice among most users. Microsoft was dedicated to destroying anything it perceived as "competition". And Lotus wasn't just competition, it was far superior to Excel at the time.
Plus, there were two problems with Excel:
1. A mouse was needed for some functions
2. Lotus macros wouldn't work in an Excel file
Those two roadblocks made me say "Thanks, but no thanks" to Excel. And that attitude prevailed for near two decades. That attitude would be met with scorn by some, laughter by some. All the while, I continued to use Lotus. I had no interest in learning Microsoft Visual Basic (the tool used to write macro commands in Excel). Why reinvent the wheel?
When Lotus was taken over by IBM, and a new release no longer worked well with existing macro commands, and IBM took away formatting via the colon key, I simply stayed with Lotus Release 5 for Windows. It was still working extremely well for me.
Until Windows 7 was released in 2010.
Lotus would not run on that operating system! But there was a workaround--all you needed was to have a certain version of Windows 7 (either Professional or Ultimate), and within that operating system you could set up a virtual XP machine. Lotus would still work. But it was problematic, something I didn't realize at the time. In addition, the oncoming release of Windows 8 would not allow you to easily set up a virtual machine. At some point, Microsoft would no longer support Windows 7 (as they had discontinued support for Windows XP in 2014) and I would be, for lack of a more suitable word, screwed.
And so I fretted. Should I learn Microsoft Visual Basic? There was nothing I couldn't do in Lotus and some of the macros I had written over the years alleviated the need for hours of manual work in some of my files. Take away those macros, you make my spreadsheet life fairly miserable.
Then disaster hit. In January 2015, my PC started experiencing random shutdowns and restarts. Eventually it would quit entirely as the motherboard gave up the ghost. But after one of these early shutdowns, suddenly my XP Mode disappeared! No problem, I just reinstalled XP mode. But, all my Lotus files were on that virtual drive, so everything was lost, all 1,500+ files. Gone in an instant. Luckily I had backed up my files. Not so luckily, I had not done this since early October 2014. Three months of work was gone. Poof. Like they never existed.
That turned out to be the tipping point. I loved Lotus, but this was starting to be more trouble than it was worth. I began to seriously study Excel (throwing up in my mouth a bit each time I loaded that evil program  ). The version of Excel I was using at home and at work, Excel 2010, would not even read a Lotus file. I started playing around with copying a few non-essential Lotus files to Excel. Files would have to be copy-and-pasted one sheet at a time. An overwhelming majority of my Lotus files had heavy-duty formatting involved (different size fonts, borders around cells and groups of cells, etc); this formatting was lost in the copy/paste process and had to be reformatted by scratch in Excel.
I persisted. I was able to create templates in Excel for similar types of files--with the formatting in place, pasting data from a Lotus file would fit nicely into the new Excel file. At the same time, I was studying keyboard shortcuts in Excel, and learning new functions which made it possible to set up certain Excel worksheets without the need for any macro programming. For example, the Vlookup function allowed me to dump all the macro coding in my PageStat (a computerized rating system for sports teams). I also learned that I could format a specific sheet and then save that sheet as a Webpage. Again, hundreds of lines of old Lotus macro coding were rendered obsolete. Likewise, the creation of tables in an Excel file made sorting data a breeze.
The more I learned, practiced and applied, the more I realized I could have made this transition years ago!
But, Lotus was still faster when it came to raw data entry. It's something Excel could never rival. But when the only advantage is in the speed of data entry, don't the disadvantages outweigh that? In this case, it eventually became clear that Excel would be easier for me to use. And eventually, necessary. There was always that, the likelihood that Lotus would some day no longer run in Windows.
Meantime, it was time to RTFM once again, and while my knowledge of Excel is light years beyond what it was even five months ago, there is still much to be learned. More shortcuts are being learned, and as I become more familiar with Excel commands, the old Lotus way is slowly being forgotten.
Three weeks ago, I ported my final Lotus file to Excel. Was this wanted? No. Was this necessary? Yes. But I will always miss the backslash access to the Lotus menu command system, the colon access to formatting. So it is with some sadness I say goodbye to Lotus. It's a sadness in realizing IBM took the greatest software in the history of computing, and drove it into the ground.
My new PC doesn't have the Virtual Machine installed. Everything I use runs quite well in Windows 7, so there is no longer any need to run an operating system under another operating system. And with that, Lotus has officially become relegated to my past.
Goodbye, old friend.
Previous: 2/3/2015--Bad Things Do Happen in Threes!
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