Pivot Table - History

History

In their book Pivot Table Data Crunching, authors Bill Jelen and Mike Alexander refer to Pito Salas as the "father of pivot tables". While working on a concept for a new program which would eventually become Lotus Improv, Salas realized that spreadsheets have patterns of data. A tool that could help the user recognize these patterns would help to build advanced data models quickly. With Improv, users could define and store sets of categories, then change views by dragging category names with the mouse. This core functionality would provide the model for pivot tables.

Lotus Development released Improv in 1991 on the NeXT platform. A few months after the release of Improv, Brio Technology published a standalone Mac implementation called DataPivot (with technology eventually patented in 1999). Borland purchased the DataPivot technology in 1992 and implemented it in their own spreadsheet application Quattro Pro.

In 1993, at the time when the Windows version of Improv appeared, Microsoft Excel 5 was already on the market with a new functionality called a “PivotTable”. This functionality was further improved in later Excel versions:

  • Excel 97 included a new and improved PivotTable Wizard, the ability to create calculated fields, and new pivot cache objects that allow developers to write Visual Basic for Applications macros to create and modify pivot tables.
  • Excel 2000 introduced “Pivot Charts” to represent pivot table data graphically .

Read more about this topic:  Pivot Table

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