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by eyevariety
5028 days ago
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Did he use grid paper to do the schedule? Excel is really not very skeuomorphic. One variation on being more skeuomorphic would be that it came with various templates one of which looked like a typical work schedule sheet, but leveraged excel's strengths of automatic calculation. That skeuomorphic move would have helped him realize the possibilities and he could have achieved self actualization and gotten that extra 20-30% without your help. |
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In general it was a grid, but the cells weren't square, they were wider so that there was more room to write, and along the top and left side were various specialty cells for tracking schedule numbers, days of production, reference numbers, various call-outs and along the left side room for specific machines and machine operators to be inserted. He used a fairly sophisticated color coding sytem to show linked jobs as they moved through the queue and hopped machines, so a red diagonally striped cell on one machine represented the same job later in the day on another machine also using a red diagonally striped cell. It basically allowed him to plan execution of production pipelines similar to thread execution on a modern day processor.
He had to hand draw the legend on every sheet and all of the setup. And since it was all pens and markers and such, a small mistake meant redrawing the entire schedule. I remember growing up watching him sit in front of the TV working on his production schedules late into the night.
I agree that Excel in general is not terribly skeuomorphic, but like I said elsewhere in this comment, skeuomorphism is a gradient and Excel was just similar enough to a paper book-keeping ledger of old that he thought that it would only be useful to him in that sense never realizing it could replace the custom production schedule grid he managed until quite a bit later.
edit it was not too entirely different from this
http://preoccupiedbymoonlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/productio...
only quite a bit more complex and larger format, and in the end looked almost calico colored there were so many production pipelines at once on it (vs. this example with only one real pipeline)