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[December 18, 2024]

Ctrl+Shift+Enter The Dragon 🐉
Cornflower Blue 2 and a Transendental Meditation on the Spreadsheet

* * *

My sons trade Home Depot color swatches with each other like Pokemon cards.

"I'll trade you Inferno for Laser Lemon!"

Words actually spoken in my home.

They seem to have inherited my extreme penchant for visual thinking. This likely explains why when I open your spreadsheet and if I see the hardcodes aren't Dark Cornflower Blue 2, they are invisible to me. Call this monochrome blindness.

Cornflower bliss
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What is it about spreadsheets that shakes my soul? Besides being drilled into my being in 2005 on the 29th floor of 299 Park Ave under the career crippling threat of being labeled as "not-technical"?

Because beyond an numerical tool, a spreadsheet is a visual one, resonating with the deeply visual information processor.

A Brief History
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Spreadsheets were the original killer app at the dawn of the PC era. VisiCalc, the great grandfather of Excel, made the Apple II a thing. For a must-beach-read, skim 1984 Wired article, The Spreadsheet way of knowledge. It is not an accident that the founder of Lotus (which later acquired VisiCalc) began life as a full-time transcendental meditation instructor calling it "A new language, a new way of seeing".

If you feel the urge to re-live the magic, someone (undoubtedly more fanatic than I am) took the time to re-imagine VisiCalc in a Google Sheet (you're welcome).


    VisiCalc: The First Electronic Spreadsheet
    
[Figure 1: "Start here, then you'll get a fancy MacBook Pro"]




Books That Shaped Me
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After Crime and Punishment and The Power Broker comes the book that altered the course of my life: "Excel 2003 Formulas" by John Wallenbach (aka "Mr. Spreadsheet") Yes, this was read willingly. It was Chapter 15 "Performing Magic With Array Formula" that made me spit out the warm Smirnoff Ice hidden in my cubicle.

The magic? Discovering that 1000 rows of data could be crunched in a single formula. I had discovered fire.



    Excel 2003 Formulas Book
    
[Figure 2: Mr Spreadsheets Opus. 🐉]




But like Mr. Spreadsheet before me I needed my own zen framework. Ctrl+Shift+Enter The Dragon. I call it Spreadsheet Shuhari embodying the three stages of mastery: First you copy (Shu), then you adapt (Ha), finally you transcend (Ri).

Spreadsheet Shuhari 🇯🇵
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└─ spreadsheets are living teachers
└─ study, observe patterns, colors, state of non-self, then copy
└─ know why elements exist as they are before your own expression
└─ a clear spreadsheet is an act of compassion
└─ a sloppy one dishonors the reader's mind



    Enter The Dragon
    
[Figure 32: Let your arrays be like water.]



These days, watching my sons trade color swatches like a budget game of Magic the Gathering, I am proud father of a new generation of visual thinkers. 

Someday they'll build their own systems, hopefully with better color choices than Dark Cornflower Blue 2. Until then, I'll keep living Spreadsheet Shuhari, one colored coded cell at a time.




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