In early 1979, a tiny text ad ran in the back pages of Byte magazine, a journal dedicated to the emerging world of personal computers: “VisiCalc, how did you ever do without it?” If readers were unsure what had apparently been missing from their lives, they soon found out. Forty years ago this October, VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet, debuted on the market and immediately became a global phenomenon. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once hailed it as the “explosion” that moved the computer industry forward, while others have described it as “the original killer app of the information age.” In time, VisiCalc lost the spreadsheet crown to Lotus 1-2-3, which was eventually usurped by today’s king of the spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel. Or, as countless frustrated business users have grumbled over the decades, ExHell.

For Excel’s most hardcore users—the legions of finance, accounting and administrative workers who have been toiling on it for decades—Microsoft’s workhorse spreadsheet software can be a godsend; it’s powerful, versatile and simple to use. Yet with those strengths come many headaches: broken links, input errors and the mayhem of managing conflicting versions of files. They’re frustrating and costly problems that Vena Solutions, one of Canada’s fastest-growing tech companies, has set out to fix. “As a canvas, you can use Excel to model pretty much any kind of data you want to plan, forecast and budget,” says Vena CEO Don Mal. “It just falls down when it’s used in a multi-user corporate environment.”