Joel on Software - “Two Stories” - Fortune

Joel on Software - “Two Stories”

I pretty rapidly realized that the App Architecture group knew even less than I did about macros. At least, I had talked to a handful of macro developers and some Excel old-timers to get a grip on what people actually did with Excel macros: things like recalculating a spreadsheet every day, or rearranging some data according to a certain pattern. But the App Architecture group had merely thought about macros as an academic exercise, and they couldn’t actually come up with any examples of the kind of macros people would want to write. Pressured, one of them came up with the idea that since Excel already had underlining and double-underlining, perhaps someone would want to write a macro to triple underline. Yep. REAL common. So I proceeded to ignore them as diplomatically as possible.

Author Joel Spolsky
Work Two Stories