I’ve been scheduling interviews for the last few days, and part of that job has involved taking a spreadsheet exported from Typeform (where we collected responses to a questionnaire from candidates) and trying to find a way to make a report from it.

You’d think this would be easy, the kind of thing people do in offices all day long.

All I want to do is take this:

First Name,Last Name,City,Start Date
Peter,Rukavina,Charlottetown,2024-04-01
Sully,Sillerson,New York,2024-05-01

And turn it into this:

First Name:  Peter
Last Name:   Rukavina
City:        Charlottetown
Start Date:  2024-04-01

With one person’s details on each page.

I can sort of do that by loading the spreadsheet into Numbers and selecting Table > Transpose Rows and Columns. This gets me halfway there; from that point, I can selectively hide and show columns, print each, and get where I want to go.

But surely.

My second real computer job, when I was 16 years old, was at the Canadian Tire store in Burlington, Ontario. I started off working there on the sales floor, selling Commodore VIC-20s to the unsuspecting; eventually I was moved upstairs to the comptroller’s office, where a copy of the newly-released Lotus 1-2-3 had recently arrived. 

Lotus 1-2-3 was amazing. It’s hard to convey just how amazing it was to my teenaged eyes, but I loved it, and loved figuring out how to make it do all sorts of amazing things. Canadian Tire was able to learn much about itself because of my work, from how productive their mechanics were to gaining insights into wages vs. sales. Along the way I learned a lot about Canadian Tire, and business, about spreadsheets, and about how to be a computer consultant.

Using Numbers, more than 40 years later, isn’t much different than using Lotus 1-2-3 back then. There certainly hasn’t been 40 years worth of innovation or creativity applied to the category.

The underlying issue here, of course, is that Numbers is a spreadsheet, whereas what I really want is a database manager. Indeed, I made a good living from being a dBASE manager for much of my 20s. 

Producing reports was one of the things dBASE did well, and what I really want is its modern equivalent.

But apparently there isn’t one. Whereas VisiCalc begat Lotus 1-2-3 begat Numbers, it seems like FileMaker and dBASE and their ilk are a category of consumer software that died on the vine.

(Technically FileMaker didn’t die, it just became something else: an $800 piece of enterprise software that can, indeed, produce a report from an imported spreadsheet.)

What do people do these days when they want to keep track of generic things, search for those things, report on those things, share those things?

When did computers on our desks stop being able to do that?