Since 1993, 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. 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. Excel has extensive graphing capabilities, and enables users to perform mail merge. 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). xls.Įxcel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets however, the essence 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.Įxcel was the first spreadsheet that allowed the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). 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 still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is. However, over time this practice has been ignored, and Microsoft cleared up the issue permanently when they purchased the trademark of the other program. 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.

Microsoft Excel 2.1 included a runtime version of Windows 2.1Įarly in its life Excel became the target of a trademark lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named 'Excel' in the finance industry. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2008. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 12, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2007. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so.

This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing GUI software. 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. The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line-up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) was released in November 1987. 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. 3.3 Export and migration of spreadsheets.

Excel for mac versions