The other day I saw an article on the web by a writer who seemed to think that VLOOKUP was new to Excel 2013. Strange, I thought: I was using it in Lotus 123 in 1990.
Now that is only the earliest documented usage by me (I made a note in the Lotus manual). VLOOKUP has been around longer than that. I cannot find when it started but Visicalc (one of the earliest spreadsheets) had a LOOKUP function in 1979.

Well, 1979 is ancient history in computer spreadsheet, so I was rather amused on my recent holiday to Turkey (that’s why there haven’t been any blogs) to visit some sites which had carved tombs going back over 2500 years!

The photograph is of Myra in Antalya, with the carved tombs on the left, and the relatively new Roman theatre (2nd Century AD) on the right.

Even this is new, in a country where there are sites such as Göbekli Tepe (which I didn’t visit), which have remains of man-made structures dated between 9500 and 7500BC (ie 11500 to 9500 years old)!

Carved tombs in Myra (Turkey)