One way Lotus 1-2-3 and Quip are similar is how precisely they’re targeting their platforms. The legacy of these failed efforts: It remains difficult to combine words and numbers in modern documents, and even apps from the same company rarely play as nicely together as they should. The rise of the Web ended up rendering both more or less irrelevant, though OLE persists in the plumbing of Microsoft Windows. In the 1990s, Microsoft and Apple actually tried to accomplish something similar on their desktop operating systems through competing technologies-Microsoft’s OLE, short for Object Linking and Embedding, and Apple’s OpenDoc. On mobile devices-Quip is available on the Web, iOS, and Android-Quip has custom keyboards that pop up when you’re manipulating numbers, switching back to a regular keyboard when you’re entering text. Flip to the sheet view, and you can manipulate the numbers much as you would in a conventional spreadsheet. In Quip, you can insert a reference to a row and column in an embedded spreadsheet, and it updates live.
But when the numbers change in the spreadsheet, you’ve got to update the other document by hand. A typical way to prepare that might be to break it into two documents, a narrative commentary and a structured spreadsheet. Let’s say you’re doing a financial report which includes a year-to-date budget. In a concession to the old ways-and the ingrained habits of its users-Quip lets you choose whether you’re creating a “document” or a “spreadsheet.” Under the hood, though, they’re the same thing on Quip-just different views of a collection of data. Quip lets you flip between viewing a file as a “document” or a “spreadsheet”-underneath, it’s the same data. That world where you have to pick your app before you start creating a document is what Taylor’s trying to leave behind. (Previously, you could edit both kinds of documents in its Google Drive app.) When it introduced separate iPhone apps for word-processing and spreadsheets in April, users howled with discontent. If anything, Google’s taken a step backwards recently. A word-processing document is a word-processing document.
1-2-3 may be dead, but its fundamental metaphors still rule products like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Apple’s Numbers app.
Last month, IBM killed off the aging product, which was born in the earliest days of the PC era and helped make the original IBM PC a success.
Quip is thereby upending a status quo that has ruled spreadsheet software for three decades, since the rise of Lotus 1-2-3. You just create a document, and you can add paragraphs, images, checklists, and now fully functional spreadsheets to it as you go. Put simply, you don’t have to choose between words or numbers in Quip 3.0. See also: Quip Launches, Promising to Reinvent Word Processing In The Era Of The iPadīut Quip-just as it managed to have a very different take on word processing when it launched last summer-has introduced an entirely different way of including numbers in a document. Taylor, whose startup is challenging Microsoft, Google, and Apple in the market for mobile productivity tools, has just added features for slinging numbers alongside its existing tools for creating documents made of words. The answer, according to Bret Taylor, is when it’s a Quip document.