Has The Spreadsheet Trapped The Human Heart In A Cell?

Or: WHERE YOU AT? HOLLA WHEN YOU GET THIS

The most unlikely romantic development of 2002’s “Dilemma” was not that between the single’s performers, Nelly and Kelly Rowland. (In any case, the pair deny ever being anything more than friends.) It was the the track’s accompanying video that really raised eyebrows. In particular, the Destiny’s Child singer’s use of a spreadsheet to send a text to her boo.

Clearly, anyone with a basic grasp of either early 2000s-era cellular phone technology or Microsoft Office would know the difference between a text message and a spreadsheet. It’s an error that has continued to haunt Rowland long after the song’s release. “They made me look nuts,” Rowland said of the video’s makers just last year, 22 years after the event. Or, “Boy, I’m crazy over you,” as the lyrics expressed it at the time.

The software in question wasn’t Excel, it turns out. Rather, it was an “EPOC Sheet that ran on the phone’s Symbian operating system”, although it “was compatible with XLS files”. Not that it mattered either way to Rowland. “I don’t know what that is,” she said, addressing the spreadsheet faux pas again in 2019 (she gets asked about it a lot). “I don’t know what Microsoft Excel is.”

Ah, to be Kelly Rowland. To be 21 years old, as she was in 2002, and unaware that Microsoft Excel even existed. And then to live the rest of your life and still only be confronted with a spreadsheet every time an interviewer brings up this incident. (Unless, of course, the Rowland household budget is now managed on one. Or, you know, she’s still using the software to draft text messages. Look, I’m not one to speak – I wrote most of this in Notes on my iPhone.) Because this to me is what success is.

I’m a very tail-end Gen Xer. A Xennial, like Rowland, born within the release dates of the original Star Wars trilogy. Meaning I have one foot in the analogue and one foot in the digital. Unlike Rowland, my performing – and especially singing – abilities are suboptimal. But I was a reasonably bright, keep-your-head-down kid from an unassuming suburban corner of southeast England. I might go somewhere, just probably not anywhere exciting.

I was, as it happens, the first in my family to go away to uni, if you discount my mum’s Open University degree. And not only did I pay no fees, I got a grant to do so – an opportunity not extended to anyone in the academic year below me. I snuck in through a window, one that has since slammed shut. When people from the lower middle classes, even working classes, were more likely to go on to a career in the arts or creative industries. But, you know, a window closes and a Windows application opens…

Speaking to my career advice teacher at school, such upwards mobility was still fanciful. In their mind, the best I could hope for was a humdrum job in an office, which only strengthened my resolve to run in the other direction. And, given the sheer luck of where and when I’d been born, that was an option.

***

Rowland was just one when Microsoft launched a spreadsheet programme called Multiplan, its precursor to Excel. The first version of Excel as we know it was built, in 1985, for the Macintosh. (I know – Apple, the technological megacorporation for the free thinker, was the first to get on board with an application that’s the very antithesis of free thought.) The Windows-friendly 2.0 version arrived in 1987, but it was undoubtedly being packaged up in 1990’s Microsoft Office suite that led to Excel becoming the ubiquitous workplace tool that it is today. And by 2016, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft – today vying with Apple and Nvidia to be the world’s most valuable company – was calling Excel “the best consumer product we ever created”.

Graphical interface spreadsheets, of which Excel was one of the pioneers, came into being during my, and Rowland’s, lifetime. But to us and anyone born afterwards, it probably feels like they’ve been around forever. A framework for the collation of data, the lifeblood of the internet era. The matrix before The Matrix.

Sure, you could argue that getting your formulas aligned in Excel will allow you to do some pretty creative things with it. Yes, there’s Tatsuo Horiuchi, the Japanese artist who “paints” pictures with the programme. And yes, I implore you to read David Pierce’s recent account for The Verge on the Las Vegas tournament pitching to turn spreadsheeting into an esport. But out-of-the-box thinking is not what a grid of rows and columns says to me. I grew up reading Douglas Coupland then later Naomi Klein’s No Logo, listening to Nirvana (as it happened). For me, Excel represents selling out to the Man. Getting an ambition-less job in a nondescript office cubicle. Giving up. Cold, grey conformity. Death.

So, yes, I was aware of the spreadsheet. As a literal and metaphorical series of cells.

***

When it’s not preoccupied with Kelly Rowland’s misuse of a spreadsheet, the internet has a joke. It goes: What do Excel and an incel have in common? They both think something’s a date when it isn’t.

I’d argue that the similarities go further. Both can be restrictive, constraining, manipulative, even. (David Pierce admits as much: “If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones.” He argues that “understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower”, and we should all by now be wary of how such unequal power dynamics work out – and what happens to those who feel powerless, see the incels above.)

Likewise, both software and people are only as good as the information they’re given. And both spreadsheets and misogynists are shaping the world in ways that I’m less than comfortable with. (I could add that they’re also tools.)

Ironically, Excel has played its part in allowing culture behind incels to fester by presenting relationships as a zero-sum game. The intersection between our romantic lives and data management is today more pronounced than ever, governed by algorithms that have their roots in spreadsheets. Dating apps have gone on to change the way we hook up.

It makes sense, then, that some singles – let’s call them users – have turned the tables and utilised spreadsheets to identify their best prospective match. Romance isn’t dead, yet. But how long is it before human emotion is rendered a #REF! error?

***

There are those who think – hope – that today’s adoption of AI in the workplace could end up as a transition not dissimilar to the one Excel ushered in 40 years ago. In the 1980s, computerised spreadsheets were themselves an existential threat, set to render vast swaths of the workforce unemployable. And just as a spreadsheet needs a working population to populate it, ChatGPT needs a prompt. Either way, I’m still fighting yesterday’s battles.

I’m personally well out of the dating game (which really is an esport these days). And, working in the creative industries – the shallow end, admittedly – I also thought I was free from the tyranny of Excel when it came to my career. Very occasionally, I get to interview celebrities, but I’m yet to probe too deeply when it comes to anyone’s use of Excel. And yet, the spreadsheet is spreading its tendrils and increasingly encroaching on my professional life.

Why is being asked to write and edit in Excel such an affront? For one, it’s not what the software is designed to do. It is built to crunch numbers, not words. (We’ve got Word for that.) And as beautiful a language that mathematics is, it lacks the nuance of English.

For another, the formatting is way off. I’m sure there is a way to get a line break without the space key taking you to the next cell, but I’m yet to find it. It’s clunky, hard to use and even harder to read. If you thought a blank page was scary, cast your eyes on an infinite grid of columns and rows.

(Not infinite. There is only so far you can push Excel, as we learnt in 2020 when Public Health England misplaced almost 16,000 positive Covid test results that fell off the end of a spreadsheet. So maybe the software can’t even do what it’s supposed to do right.)

What I can see I’m really struggling with – other than vast blocks of formatted data – is my own prejudice. It’s just a different way of seeing the world, and we all need to be open to those.

***

The days of gut decisions are over. However, while old-school football managers may be giving way to data-driven moneyballers and xG projections, you still need a human being at the helm.

Something I’ve learnt as I’ve got older is that life isn’t as black and white as I once thought. It doesn’t have to be cubicle grey, either. A spreadsheet is the responsible bit that allows you to go wild elsewhere, or so I’m told. Equally, you can’t spell function without fun. The world isn’t quite as binary as Excel or incels would likely have you believe.

I guess I just need to get over myself. Get with the programme! Words will fit in a cell, you just need to know how to wrap the text. Concentrate on the bigger picture. And work out how to disable macros, which continue to do my nut in.

No matter what I do, you know I’m crazy over you.