That’s right. Not real.

Everything on a computer screen, on a phone, on any user-interface, is a physical representation of something we are already familiar with in the physical world.

When you play a computer game with racing cars there is no racing car inside the computer. It’s just made to look that way, otherwise the game can’t be played; not by humans anyway.

Same with spreadsheets. And Word documents. And PowerPoint slides.

On a spreadsheet we enter data in a cell. This is the same as writing a number on a sheet of analysis paper. That’s how we can relate to it. Because the spreadsheet on the computer screen looks like a sheet of paper.

But there is no spreadsheet inside the computer. No physical spreadsheet, anymore than the racing car.

We can’t really begin to use the spreadsheet effectively until we understand it beyond the physical.

Or, in other words, until we escape from the limitations of A3 analysis paper thinking.

Bricklin and Fransktone created VisiCalc to look like a sheet of A3 analyis paper so that we ‘get it’. We have now ‘got it’ – most of us. Now we can move on and use it fully.

We need to shift a few gears!

Have you ‘got it’ and moved on? Try the Celebrity Chef Spreadsheet Challenge. The penny will drop when you victoriously cross the finish line 🙂

TO BE IN THE BETA PROGRAM … Comment below.

Hiran de Silva

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