Microsoft Excel History

Excel 1.0, 1.5, 2.x

Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982. Multiplan became very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987. Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by 1988 Excel had started to outsell 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 GUI software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so.

Early in 1993 Excel became the target of a trademark lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named "Excel" in the finance industry. As the result of the dispute Microsoft had to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel" in all of its formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time this practice has been ignored, and Microsoft cleared up the issue permanently when they purchased the trademark of the other program. Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program; while this is no longer common, the program's icon on Windows (before Excel 2013) still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is .xls (.xlsx in newer versions).

Excel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet software, VisiCalc: the program displays cells organized in rows and columns, and each cell may contain data or a formula, with relative or absolute references to other cells.

Excel became the first spreadsheet to allow 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 (previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command). Excel also introduced extensive graphing capabilities.

From its first version Excel supported end user programming of macros (automation of repetitive tasks) and user defined functions (extension of Excel's built-in function library). In early versions of Excel these programs were written in a macro language whose statements had formula syntax and resided in the cells of special purpose macro sheets (stored with file extension .XLM in Windows.) XLM was the default macro language for Excel through Excel 4.0. Beginning with version 5.0 Excel recorded macros in VBA by default but with version 5.0 XLM recording was still allowed as an option. After version 5.0 that option has been discontinued. All versions of Excel, including Excel 2010 are capable of running an XLM macro, though Microsoft discourages their use.

Excel 5.0

With version 5.0, Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic which adds the ability to automate tasks in Excel and to provide user-defined functions (UDF) for use in worksheets. VBA is a powerful addition to the application and includes a fully featured integrated development environment (IDE). Macro recording can produce VBA code replicating user actions, thus allowing simple automation of regular tasks. VBA allows the creation of forms and in‑worksheet controls to communicate with the user. The language supports use (but not creation) of ActiveX (COM) DLL's; later versions add support for class modules allowing the use of basic object-oriented programming techniques.

The automation functionality provided by VBA made Excel a target for macro viruses. This caused serious problems until antivirus products began to detect these viruses. Microsoft belatedly took steps to prevent the misuse by adding the ability to disable macros completely, to enable macros when opening a workbook or to trust all macros signed using a trusted certificate.

Versions 5.0 to 9.0 of Excel contain various Easter eggs, including a "Hall of Tortured Souls", although since version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented features from their products.

 

Excel 95

Internal rewrite to 32 bits. Almost no external changes, but faster and more stable.

Excel 97

Major upgrade. Introduced the paper clip office assistant. Standard VBA used instead of internal Excel Basic. Includes now removed Natural Language labels.

Excel 2000

Minor upgrade. Clipboard can hold multiple objects at once. The Office Assistant, whose frequent unsolicited appearance in Excel 97 had annoyed many users, became less intrusive.

Excel XP

Released about 2001. Very minor enhancements.

Excel 2003

Minor enhancements, most significant being the new Tables.

Excel 2007

This release was a major upgrade from the previous version. Similar to other updated Office products, Excel in 2007 used the new Ribbon menu system. This is different from what users are used to, but the number of mouse-clicks needed to reach a given functionality is generally fewer (e.g., removing gridlines only required two mouse-clicks instead of five). However, most business users agree that the replacement of the straightforward menu system with the more convoluted ribbon dramatically reduces productivity.

Also like other office products, the Office Open XML file formats were introduced, including .xlsm for a workbook with macros and .xlsx for a workbook without macros.

Specifically, many of the size limitations of previous versions were greatly increased. To illustrate, the number of rows was now 1,048,576 (2²⁰) and columns was 16,384 (2¹⁴; the far-right column is XFD). This changes what is a valid A1 reference versus a named range. Other features included an improved management of named variables through the Name Manager, and much improved flexibility in formatting graphs, which now allow (x, y) coordinate labeling and lines of arbitrary weight. Several improvements to pivot tables were introduced. This version made more extensive use of multiple cores for the calculation of spreadsheets; however, VBA macros are not handled in parallel and XLL add‑ins were only executed in parallel if they were thread-safe and this was indicated at registration.

Excel 2010

Minor enhancements, including the following:

·         Improved pivot tables

·         More conditional formatting options

·         Additional image editing capabilities

·         In-cell charts called sparklines

·         Ability to preview before pasting

·         Office 2010 backstage feature for document-related tasks

·         Ability to customize the Ribbon

·         Many new formulas, most highly specialized to improve accuracy

 

Excel 2013

A lot of new tools have been included in this release:

·         FlashFill

·         PowerView

·         PowerPivot

·         Timeline Slicer

·         Windows App

·         Inquire

·         50 new functions

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