Checkbox Features and the Competition
A story from “Hardcore Software” about how Excel used to have a feature to create slides using rows in a spreadsheet.
This was a twitter thread from July 12, 2021 further describing a feature mentioned in the latest post in Hardcore Software, a non-fiction, first-person account of the rise and fall of the PC revolution serialized through this platform, one section at a time, once or twice a week.
An old Excel example of head to head competition. When your product is in a well-known category, sometimes you get cornered by customers, analysts or even press (HN? 🙄) to do a “checkbox” feature. You don’t want to, but you start hearing your product is missing something. 1/
2/ Excel’s most aggressive competitor in the early days of Windows was from upstart Borland that moved more quickly to Windows than others. They competed on price and performance. They also had an obscure feature — make a slide show in a spreadsheet. Review from 1994!
3/ The Excel team was also an upstart relative to the monster that was 1–2–3. Excel 3.0 (1990) was a huge effort bringing out a new Mac and Win version simultaneously. It had many new features including the first toolbar (even on the box cover). It had a super lame slide show ☑️
4/ Excel 4.0 (1994) also a big upgrade & part of the new Office suite just getting rolling. A new PM was tasked with updating the slide show feature “for competitive reasons”. Sort of weird since by then Microsoft acquired PowerPoint. The PM ended up coding on their own — checkbox!
5/ The slide show feature ended up being absurdly elaborate. And also crazy cumbersome.
Of course almost no one was using PowerPoint (or any slide making software) yet as the category was too new.
Imagine you have a workbook with some numbers and a chart. File New Slides.
6/ For each slide you select a part of the workbook and *paste* it into a row in the slideshow sheet. The add-in then made a graphical thumbnail, adding a row. You could also pick the transition animation, sound, etc. Amazing. That animation preview is straight from PowerPoint!
7/ If you wanted to do a slide with text for bullets you just used the regular text features of Excel, probably on a separate worksheet.
8/ When you’re all done you can use the commands on the slide sheet to play the show.
9/ As far as I know, having a checkbox worked and no one ever complained. I am not sure it was used as no one noticed it was missing in the next release :-) See review below!
Sometimes you just gotta do these features to remove “objections” even though it rubs you the wrong way.
10/ Check out this video of the feature in action. I recorded this on a new M1 iPad running iDos after installing Windows 3.0. Wow snappy! Truly amazing this works. Wow!
11/ This feature was mentioned in the latest post on the Harcore Software substack — subscribe it is fun. hardcoresoftware.substack.com // END
