Pito Salas is a Curaçaoan-American

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

-based software developer. While working with Lotus Advanced Technology Group in 1986, Salas invented the

pivot table A pivot table is a table of grouped values that aggregates the individual items of a more extensive table (such as from a database, spreadsheet, or business intelligence program) within one or more discrete categories. This summary might include ...

, a "next-generation"

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

concept that was released by Lotus in 1989, as

Lotus Improv Lotus Improv is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Development released in 1991 for the NeXTSTEP platform and then for Windows 3.1 in 1993. Development was put on hiatus in 1994 after slow sales on the Windows platform, and officially ...

. 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 Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now owned by OpenText, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in December, 2003. The Documentum pla ...

in 2002. He is a principal architect of the BlogBridge Newsreader software. Salas is Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at

Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , ...

, where he earned his degree.

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* * * American computer programmers Brandeis University faculty Living people People from Cambridge, Massachusetts Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) American people of Curaçao descent Brandeis University alumni {{US-compu-bio-stub