Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Microsoft Excel

Episode notes

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Jason Pargin explore why Microsoft Excel is secretly incredibly fascinating.

Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week’s bonus episode.

LINKS FOR JASON PARGIN:

• PRE-ORDER the next novel by Jason Pargin! He’s signing copies for a limited time, for Parnassus Books in Nashville TN. The novel is called I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom.
• Jason Pargin on Tiktok
• “Bigfeets” (1900HOTDOG and Apple Podcasts)
• Jason’s website
• Jason’s Substack
• Jason Pargin on Twitter

LINKS FOR KATIE GOLDIN:

• Katie Goldin on Twitter
• @ProBirdRights
• ‘Creature Feature’ podcast (iHeartRadio)
• When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide (Audubon)

RESOURCES USED TO INFORM THE EPISODE’S LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

• native-land.ca
• U.S. Department Of Arts And Culture
• The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland (Smithsonian)
• “Finding Lenapehoking” (YouTube / Hudson River Maritime Museum)
• Why Do They Call It Beacon? (The Highlands Current)
• Dutch & Native American Heritage In The Hudson River Valley (National Park Service)

RESEARCH SOURCES:

• What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors (Journal of Organizational and End User Computing)
• Audits of Operational Spreadsheets (Raymond Panko’s website)
• Meet the Excel warriors saving the world from spreadsheet disaster (Wired Magazine)
• Jason Pargin’s posts about Excel stopping at 15 digits
• How to Increase the Amount of Digits Allowed in a Cell in Excel (Houston Chronicle)
• Microsoft support page: “Excel specifications and limits”
• Salesforce blog post: “Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets: Which Is Better for Salesforce?”
• Top 10 Microsoft Moments: Microsoft Office Released (TIME Magazine)
• The Reinhart-Rogoff error – or how not to Excel at economics (The Conversation)
• Reinhart, Rogoff… and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs (BBC News)
• Opinion: The Excel Depression (The New York Times)
• Scientific Journal Publishes AI-Generated Rat with Gigantic Penis In Worrying Incident (VICE Motherboard)
• Spreadsheet errors can have disastrous consequences – yet we keep making the same mistakes (The Conversation)
• Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts (Ars Technica)
• MI5 makes 1,061 bugging errors (The Guardian)
• How an Excel Error Cost JP Morgan $6 Billion (“The Pareto Investor” on Medium.com)
• Excel error leaves Barclays with more Lehman assets than it bargained for (Computer World)
• Steve Jobs Said This 1 Surprising Thing Is What Made Apple a Giant Success (Inc. Magazine)
• Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet | Dan Bricklin (TED Talks on YouTube)
• This Day In History: April 4, 1975: Microsoft founded (History.com)
• Charles Simonyi (Computer History Museum)
• NASA Spaceflight Participant biography for Charles Simonyi