Pivot Table - History

History

In their book Pivot Table Data Crunching, authors Bill Jelen and Mike Alexander refer to Pito Salas as the "father of pivot tables". While working on a concept for a new program which would eventually become Lotus Improv, Salas realized that spreadsheets have patterns of data. A tool that could help the user recognize these patterns would help to build advanced data models quickly. With Improv, users could define and store sets of categories, then change views by dragging category names with the mouse. This core functionality would provide the model for pivot tables.

Lotus Development released Improv in 1991 on the NeXT platform. A few months after the release of Improv, Brio Technology published a standalone Mac implementation called DataPivot (with technology eventually patented in 1999). Borland purchased the DataPivot technology in 1992 and implemented it in their own spreadsheet application Quattro Pro.

In 1993, at the time when the Windows version of Improv appeared, Microsoft Excel 5 was already on the market with a new functionality called a “PivotTable”. This functionality was further improved in later Excel versions:

  • Excel 97 included a new and improved PivotTable Wizard, the ability to create calculated fields, and new pivot cache objects that allow developers to write Visual Basic for Applications macros to create and modify pivot tables.
  • Excel 2000 introduced “Pivot Charts” to represent pivot table data graphically .

Read more about this topic:  Pivot Table

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
    —Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    “History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
    In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
    Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
    —Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)