About Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program
written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the
Microsoft Windows operating system and Apple Macintosh
computers. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for
these platforms and has been so since version 5 1993 and its
bundling as part of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program
called Multiplan in 1982, which was very
popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems
it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. This promoted development
of a new spreadsheet called Excel which started with the
intention to, in the words of Doug Klunder, "do everything
1-2-3 does and do it better". The first version of Excel was
released for the Mac in 1985 and the first
Windows version (numbered 2.0 to line-up with the
Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment)
was released in November 1987. Lotus were slow
to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and
by 1988 Excel had started to oversell 1-2-3 and
helped Microsoft achieve the position of leading PC software
developer. This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world,
solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing
graphical software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years
or so. The current version is Excel 11, also called
Microsoft Office Excel 2003.
Early in its life Excel became the target of a trademark
lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named "Excel". As the result of the dispute Microsoft
was required to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel"
in all of its formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time this
practice has slipped.
Excel offers a large number of user interface tweaks, however the
essence of UI remains the same as in the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc: the
cells are organized in rows and columns, and contain data or formulas with relative
or absolute references to other cells.
Microsoft Excel 2003, showing a default new spreadsheet Excel was the
first spreadsheet that allowed the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets
(fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell
recomputation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are updated, while
previously spreadsheets recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific
user command. Excel has extensive graphing capabilities.
When first bundled into Microsoft Office in 1993,
Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint had their
GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel, the killer app on the
PC at the time.
Since 1993 Excel includes support for Visual Basic
for Applications (VBA) as a scripting language.
VBA is a powerful tool that makes Excel a complete
programming environment. VBA and macro recording allow automating routines
that otherwise take several manual steps. VBA allows creating forms
to handle user input. Automation functionality of VBA exposed
Excel as a target for macro viruses.
Excel versions from 5.0 to 9.0
contain various Easter eggs.
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