Do you know that Microsoft Excel has been helping businesses for about 35 years? Excel is a SAAS spreadsheet for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. Once you downloaded Microsoft Office, Excel is included.
Dan Bricklin, as known as the “father of the spreadsheet”, invented the spreadsheet application called VisiCalc.
Before Excel existed, Microsoft had a spreadsheet program called Multiplan to compete against the most popular spreadsheet in 1982.
Source: winworldpc.com
For Excel 1, Microsoft had a really small team. Mike Koss (team lead), Jabe Blumenthal (program manager), Doug Klunder (lead developer), and Jon DeVaan (copy protection).
There was only one small upgrade for Excel between Office 3.0 and Office 4.0 from 1992 to 1994.
1999 is a big year, many updates provided a much smoother user experience within security notice and interface.
In 2007, Microsoft introduced the ribbon interface. With a set of tools of creating and formatting, the user could make high-end professional-looking documents.
Then Microsoft broke the wall of the location limitation with Office 2010. Users were able to work no matter where they were. They had the freedom to use the same appication effiectly from either PCs, phone or the web brower.
Other than those milestones I mentioned above, Excel published a lot of “first”s, such as:
- the first to allow users to customize spreadsheet appearance
- auto-fill
- intelligently copy cells.
Resources:
Smith, Steph, Aug. 25th, 2019, An Ode to Excel: 34 Years of Magic, https://blog.stephsmith.io/history-of-excel/
Version Museum, Design History of Microsoft Excel, https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/microsoft-excel
Kumar, Arun, Jan. 28th, 2016, History & Evolution Of Microsoft Office Software, https://www.thewindowsclub.com/history-evolution-microsoft-office-software
I never notice that the Excel is 35 years old! Thank you for your sharing that!
Very clear and easy to understand! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for sharing the history of Excel.
It’s interesting to see how Microsoft Excel looked like back when it was introduced in MS-DOS.