Misplaced Pages

Microsoft Excel: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editNext edit →Content deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 17:14, 11 May 2004 view source144.132.30.180 (talk)No edit summary← Previous edit Revision as of 18:21, 11 May 2004 view source Chocolateboy (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users8,633 editsm rv: removed spam: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=144.132.30.180Next edit →
Line 41: Line 41:
* *
* by the ] * by the ]
*




Revision as of 18:21, 11 May 2004

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. It was originally developed as Multiplan, then as Excel for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (1987) was therefore version 2.0. With the introduction of Windows 3.0 in 1990, Excel started to oversell Lotus 1-2-3. The current version is 11, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2003.

Excel was the first spreadsheet allowing to define the visual looks of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, where only cells referenced by the cell being modified are updated, while previously spreadsheets recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command.

File:Microsoft Excel screenshot.png
Microsoft Excel, showing a default new spreadsheet

When first bundled into Microsoft Office in 1993, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel, still the killer app on the PC at the time.

Early in its life Excel became the target of a copyright 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 has extensive graphing capabilities, added support for Visual Basic for Applications as a scripting language in 1993 - aiming to add automation functionality, but making it a prime target for macro viruses. Excel offers a large number of user interface tweaks, but its essence is little different from the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc.

Many versions have an Easter egg.

Versions

  • Excel - 1985
  • Excel 2.0 - MS-DOS 3.0 - 10/31/1987
  • Excel 3.0 - 12/9/90
  • Excel 4.0 - Windows 3.1 - 4/1/1992
  • Excel 4.0a - Windows 3.1 - 11/1/1992
  • Excel 5.0 - Windows 3.1 - 12/14/1993
  • Excel 95 - (7.0) - Windows 95/NT - 7/27/1995
  • Excel 97 - (8.0) - 1/15/1997
  • Excel 2000 - (9.0)
  • Excel 2002 - (10.0)
  • Excel 2003 - (11.0)

Competitors


External links