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•Eight Greatest Computer Innovations that Actually Make Life Easier                83

even in two years if the sales came in on plan, but they did not know, on the down

side, at what point the lack of sales would start to threaten the cashflow of the

company or the department involved. They did not know, on the upside, when

higher than expected sales would push the production people into further invest-

ment. But mainly they found it difficult to have a comfortable level of information to

compare one investment project with another when the type of investment was very

different. They need to be able to ask an infinite number of ‘what if’ questions.

Various pieces of applications software were written and experimented with,

but it was not until the launch of the first spreadsheet system Visicalc in

the late 1970s that managers received the ability to create the models they The move from

wanted, and to break free from their reliance on the finance department dependency

to measure, probably to five decimal places, the financial outcome of the on the finance

inspired guesses managers make when estimating the future. Computers department is

opened up a totally new planning environment.                                rendered

The move from dependency on the finance department is rendered useless, of

useless, of course, if it leads to a new dependency on the computer de- course, if it

partment. Out of the prying department into the technical mire, you might leads to a new

say. Here also spreadsheets offered, and continue to offer, a simple to use dependency

mechanism that allows functional managers to create their own models to            on the

meet exactly the problem they are trying to solve. Spreadsheets are the computer

antithesis of the general-purpose computer system that solves part of eve- department.

ryone’s problem but fails everybody in some way.

The use of the words ‘simple’ and ‘computers’ in combination always needs

careful examination, remember the cornered rat, but the spreadsheet genuinely can

be simple to use. It can then be stretched in a thousand ways to offer complex

solutions to complex problems. People who keep learning about them and using

them find that they are using not just an upmarket calculating machine capable of

producing models, but a powerful programming language of immensely wide value.

In fact, even seasoned spreadsheet modellers after some years are still aware that

they are only using a fraction of the power of the tool.
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