is a non-free commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993. Excel forms part of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft
Excel has become a crucial tool in the international workplace,
providing basic database functionality, along with spreadsheet and
calculation tools. While it is currently the market leader for
spreadsheets, the history of excel shows that throughout the 1980s and
90s it faced significant competition from rival software platforms like
Lotus Notes, Mosaic TWIN and the Paperback VP Planner. The original
Microsoft spreadsheet program was called Multiplan - which began
development in 1982 - but it was never as financially successful as Lotus Notes.
Interestingly, Excel was first developed for the Macintosh operating system beginning in 1984. It made use of graphical menus and the mouse, innovating
strongly relative to the other major competitors at the time. Drop-down
menus and a point and click interface helped to make it more usable to
non-technical workers, and in turn helped to influence graphical user
interfaces in other software and operating systems at the time.
As such, when Windows was launched in 1987, Excel was one of the most
important and popular pieces of software for it. The early exploration
of the graphical user interface for Windows had already been conducted
and market tested by earlier versions of Excel. While it was certainly
not the first spreadsheet software package, it was the first to provide a
powerful combination of usability and functionality to business clients
of all sizes.
Lotus was relatively slow to bring Lotus 123 to Windows, failing to predict the popularity of the operating system.
One of the major turning points in Excel was the inclusion of Visual Basic for Applications
in 1993, which greatly increased the functionality of the software. In
turn, it also encouraged a generation of professionals to learn the programming language, further solidifying the long term demand for Excel over other spreadsheet suites.
History of Excel - Part 1
