[6] Javelin Software fell on difficult times when its initial public offering had to be cancelled due to it being scheduled for only a few days after the stock market crash of 1987.

Among its dynamically linked views were: diagram, formulas, table, chart, QuickGraph, worksheet, notes, errors, macro and graph.

The second fundamental advance in Javelin's design is extensive built-in time series modeling, including calendar intelligence.

"At the InfoWorld dinner at Comdex, when they gave out the award for Product of the Year and Excel came in second, Bill Gates got up and stomped out of the room in front of everybody in a spectacularly rude manner.

"Javelin was conceived by co-founder Rob Firmin, chairman and CEO, whose University of Chicago doctorate research and subsequent financial planning work at Prime Computer led him to creation of the concepts.

Lotus essentially copied two Javelin features (named data arrays and pivot tables) onto a NeXTSTEP-based and later Windows-based GUI to create Improv.

While its business failure has been attributed to the infancy of business GUI software at the time,[7] as well as an ill-conceived marketing plan that placed it head to head with the popular spreadsheet 1-2-3,[citation needed] enterprise-wide financial models converted into Javelin models at times strained the PC resources of the day.