When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn’t even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
While Excel 5 was being designed, Lotus had shipped a “new paradigm” spreadsheet called Improv. According to the press releases, Improv was a whole new generation of spreadsheet, which was going to blow away everything that existed before it. For various strange reasons, Improv was first available on the NeXT, which certainly didn’t help its sales, but a lot of smart people believed that Improv would be to NeXT as VisiCalc was to the Apple II: it would be the killer app that made people go out and buy all new hardware just to run one program.
Of course, Improv is now a footnote in history. Search for it on the web, and the only links you’ll find are from very over-organized storeroom managers who have, for some reason, made a web site with an inventory of all the stuff they have collecting dust.
Why? Because in Improv, it was almost impossible to just make lists. The Improv designers thought that people were using spreadsheets to create complicated multi-dimensional financial models. Turns out, if they asked people, they would discover that making lists was so much more common than multi-dimensional financial models, and in Improv, making lists was a downright chore, if not impossible.”
— Joel Spolsky, The Process of Designing a Product, 2009-05-09 <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-process-of-des...>