Tech Flashback: Microsoft Excel for Windows Version 3.0

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time or the opportunity to post some “retro” goodness. I definitely have to thank one particular OCAU member who had a set of Microsoft Excel for Windows Version 3.0 on 5.25″ floppies and was willing to post them to me at the nominal cost of postage, rather than just “throw them out” mindlessly.

There it is – nine floppies in total, all 5.25″ in DD 360kB format. They are labelled Setup 1-3, Help 1-3 and Library 1-3 with Disk Assy numbers 065-050-845 through to 065-050-853. From the copyright date, it looks like it was released in 1991, around the same time of Windows 3.0 which was a milestone release. It used to be said that one should never buy software until it reached Version 3.0. Lets see how much resemblance this one has after all that time.

One of the problems, no doubt, is that there are nine disks. If anything, my experience recovering floppy disks with the Kryoflux has taught me, the more floppies, the less likely you will be able to recover it all. Floppies are notoriously unreliable, but 5.25″ disks more-so due to lubricant/binder failure over time.

This one was no exception. Disks labelled Library 2 and Help 2 both were difficult disks showing numerous read issues. However, Help 2 managed to read through after about 10-minutes of grinding at it with the retries pushed up to 999. Library 2 was more of a challenge, with one sector on track 39, side 1 “holding out” and failing all retries.

I decided to disassemble the drive enough, just to rest my finger on the top head and increase the disk head contact pressure subtly, and it turned green! We are in business!

Firing it Up – Setup!

I do have numerous systems around, some of which do have installations of Windows 3.11 which are ready to run these disks through but that wouldn’t be nice. For one, capturing from those systems is hardly optimal, so I followed the virtualization route. I have a MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 virtual machine under VMWare which I keep just for these “special occasions”.

The first step is to open up the disk in File Manager (My Computer was only a Windows 95 construct, for those who don’t remember) and browse to the setup.exe file.

Sometimes even this step can be troublesome, especially if your emulated floppy drive doesn’t support the 5.25″ DSDD (40 tracks x 9 sectors per track x 2 sides) 360kB format images.

Characteristic of old Microsoft Setup applets, the files on the disk are compressed with the first character of the extension changed. Examination of the magic-numbers of the files indicate the use of KWAJ compression. No “Installshield” back then, nor solid backgrounds, nor the use of specific “Program Files” folders.

Also, commonly experienced was the puzzling “do you wish to create the directory” question, which seems quite obvious because you’re installing it that it’s most likely that’s what you intended.

Here, you can select the components you wish to install, and read the readme document. It’s quite common to deselect any components you don’t need, as space was a premium. When your hard drive may have only been 20-40Mb in size, with a good chunk taken by MS-DOS and Windows, 5,256kb isn’t exactly nothing!

I got a little fascinated at what Q+E was … so I clicked on the Select Drivers button.

As it turns out, Q+E stands for Query and Extract, a way to retrieve information from databases. At the time, dBase III and IV had a fairly strong following, especially amongst the MS-DOS users, as the incumbent database application. It’s hard to imagine a time when Microsoft wasn’t the “default” office choice.

But it is true. Because even in spreadsheets at the time, Lotus 1-2-3 was a highly popular product which I had used as well in MS-DOS. As a result, to “appease” the users of 1-2-3, formulas can be preceded with @ (which was the Lotus convention) and special provisions in help were made to help them ease the transition.

It was at this sort of time that the battle was won, and Excel took over from Lotus 1-2-3, which never recovered despite rolling on for a while as part of Smartsuite.

Setup is nothing special, but disk changing was always an annoyance, be it virtual or physical disk changing. The great thing was the liberty of these older setup programs – no need for serial numbers, and even the provision to look for files at a different path. This made it possible to host the floppy setup files on network servers or copy them to larger media, hard disks, CD-ROMs and still make it possible to install from them.

In short order, especially on a modern machine, it is set up and ready to go. Curiously, something didn’t work quite right and that was the shortcuts. The program group for Microsoft Excel 3.0 was made, but the shortcuts were placed in the Main program group.

After manually moving them over, this is what you end up with.

Firing it Up – Starting Excel

Starting up Excel gives you the option to take a quick “three-minute” tour, with slide-by-slide type animations which showcase the features available.

Interestingly, it seems some features may invoke code which doesn’t run properly in a VM … resulting in a crash. But clicking Ignore does allow the program to proceed and, it seems, mostly display correctly.

Yep, that’s how a crash dialog looked back in Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It’s interesting because these pop-over dialogs don’t have the “consistent” window-feel which only came later in Windows 95.

Continuing on with the tutorial …

Looking at what it can do, it seems pretty amazing that when I was merely two years old, all of this was possible! Mouse driven menus, colour charts, data consolidation, fonts and styles. Wow. Makes you wonder what “material difference” there is in the later versions of Excel.

Playing with Microsoft Excel 3.0

Well, the only way to find out is to actually play around with Excel similar to what I would probably do nowadays. We start by exploring the About dialog, which still contained the name of the first installer and the serial number – blacked out for privacy reasons.

The first thing I do is to try and fill some cells with numbers in a series across and down. To my surprise, entering a number and trying to drag the corner of the cell to fill, or double click the bottom right corner of the cell to fill doesn’t work – it wasn’t invented yet!

Instead, one has to go to the Data menu and click down at Series … to be able to define a series fill. That’s definitely a functional difference in terms of convenience.

The row limit was easily determined as being 16384 rows. Lets determine the column limit …

And there it is, 256 columns. Therefore, the total number of cells in a sheet is 16384 x 256 = 4 194 304 cells. This has also changed, with later versions of Excel (about 2000) supporting 65536 rows, and now, even more.

You will notice that the “tabs” at the bottom to switch between worksheets is missing – so are there such things a worksheets? Yes, there is! But you need to invoke the Window menu to switch between sheets, which is somewhat tedious. By default, a new document only has one sheet, unlike in later versions where three sheets would pop-up by default.

Another difference I noticed was that the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V shortcuts were not standardized by then. Instead, this one uses variants involving the Insert key, which requires you to take your hands off the main QWERTY alphanumeric section of the keyboard, however, this was what some MS-DOS based programs used as well.

Also rather astonishing is the lack of right-click menu shortcuts. In fact, right-clicking in the sheet does absolutely nothing whatsoever, which came as a little shock to me given how much was “made” about Microsoft mice having two buttons to Apple’s one button solution.

I think one of the most noticeable differences is the primitive toolbar which contains very few features and isn’t anything even like the Office 97-2003 iteration where it was quite completely functional.

While working with large worksheets, functions such as “undo” will quit when you start making large changes. RAM was always at a premium, so when performing such large operations, Excel 3.0 would warn you that Undo is not possible.

While this was a handy way to make sure that Excel doesn’t unexpectedly run out of RAM when it needs it most, it doesn’t stop it from being completely stopped in its tracks by something like inserting a chart with 163840 data points to plot. Windows complains it’s out of memory, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Click the button as much as you want, you’re just stuck in a loop that requires a reboot and potentially, the loss of work!

Aside from that, it was nice to see that Solver was already part of the Excel package, which is now curiously referred to as an add-in. The solver options aren’t particularly different from the current look of Solver too.

It wasn’t hard to knock up something like three 100-step Markov Chains and graph them just to demonstrate the graphing capability. By default, the graph is inserted into a sheet, but clicking into it will expand it to just displaying the chart. It’s quite nicely plotted, especially for the age of the software – arguably the lack of grid lines actually makes this look more modern and fit in with modern graphing guidelines.

There are many of the chart types available already as of Version 3.0.

The colour can also be altered, which presents a very limited palette initially, mainly due to the lack of variety of usable colours across different graphics adapter hardware. Many of them could only display 16 colours.

Invoking the colour chooser results in a wonderful dither since the VMWare environment doesn’t seem to work in a higher SVGA graphical mode due to driver issues.

Conclusion

Microsoft Excel for Windows Version 3.0 would have been one of the biggest milestone releases for Microsoft, being the third version, which people could actually contemplate buying. In return, it was the beginning of the end for many competing productivity software options, and today, it’s hard to imagine a situation where Microsoft Office isn’t the default office-suite choice.

But a whole 23 years ago, it seems that much of the functionality we use day to day is already there, although with many conveniences missing and more limitations in data size and stability. I suppose the argument against excessive bloat, and the need to improve and optimize modern software has some credence when one looks at this sub-6Mb package that does most things people would use a spreadsheet for today. Despite this, we still buy and continue to do the periodic upgrade …

Of course, it’s not realistic to live in the past, but it’s food for thought nonetheless … so much was already there in 1991. I’m amazed. At the same time, when I started using a computer, I was still using 1-2-3 mainly because of hardware constraints – Windows was slow as a dog … so back then, the users might not have seen as much of the potential as we can today (e.g. I was using a monochrome screen with Windows!).