1-2-3 had many support products that filled in the holes. Allways which improved graphics quality was merged into the main Lotus package in Release 2.2. Additional updates with Release 2.3 and 3.1 made sure that Lotus kept close enough to Excel and Surpass/Quatro Pro that a Lotus expert could make equally good charts in a timely fashion.

DDE had a quiet following. I turned a stupid* article on using DDE to transfer formatted text between programs into a long contract. Polaris Packrat got almost as much use as DDE glue between multiple applications as it did in its intended role as a PIM.

* I wrote the article. At the time, I thought it was a poor work around for the lack of RTF support in the clipboard.

I guess when it came to actually using them though, I preferred the graphs that Excel produced. 1-2-3 just feels so limited and antiquated when it came to making presentations.

The real strength of the Windows stuff came from DDE/OLE which honestly I haven’t seen all that many people use over the last 20 years. Even with the rise of ODBC and runtime versions of SQL Server you’d think there would be more custom reporting in Excel with data stored and manipulated out there.

Or maybe I don’t see it.

I’ve done the real to protected mode thing with Excel 2.1c, although I didn’t know there was a 2.1d. I’d hope that Microsoft would upgrade 2.x users to the later protected mode versions, although stepping up to version 3 was most likely the more logical choice.

It was limited to an artificially small sheet size (256 rows?) which was never a problem for me; it did ad-hoc calculations and simple graphs easily enough. Other than that it was fully functional.

I’d question whether this is a true reflection on the “professional” tools of the time though. The way I see it, real professionals used 1-2-3, which was more powerful but harder to use. Multiplan was Microsoft’s attempt to compete with that, which didn’t work out. The genius in Excel (or Word for Windows) was realizing that the growing market meant most people had never used software like this before, so ease of use and very visual interactions and capabilities would determine what the next group of computer users would use. Since that group would be larger than the install base, it became possible to achieve market dominance without winning over any existing users. But what this means is that tools like Excel 2 weren’t designed for professionals, they were designed for people who’d never used a spreadsheet before.

So apparently the easiest way to make a webm is to use ffmpeg.

ffmpeg -i xl.gif -vcodec libvpx -acodec libvorbis xl.webm