Pito Salas
Pito Salas is a Curacaoan-American Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software developer. While working with Lotus' Advanced Technology Group in 1986, Salas invented the pivot table, a "next-generation" spreadsheet concept which was released by Lotus in 1989 as Lotus Improv.
In their book Pivot Table Data Crunching, authors Bill Jelen and Mike Alexander call Pito Salas the "father of pivot tables" and credit the pivot table concept with allowing an analyst to replace fifteen minutes of complicated data table and database functions with "just seconds" of dragging fields into place.
In 1996 Salas co-founded eRoom Technology, Inc. with Jeffrey Beir and served as the company's CTO until it was acquired by Documentum in 2002.[1] He is a principal architect of the BlogBridge Newsreader software.
Salas is currently Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Brandeis University, where he earned his degree.[2]
References
- Story of Improv (Internet Archive Cache)
- Jelen, Bill: The Spreadsheet at 25, The Evolution of the Invention that Changed the World, (Holy Macro! Books) 2005
- Alexander, Michael and Bill Jelen: Pivot Table Data Crunching (QUE) June 2005