Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel) is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and for Apple Macintosh computers. It features an intuitive interface and capable calculation and graphing tools which, along with aggressive marketing, have made Excel one of the most popular microcomputer applications to date. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms and has been so since version 5 in 1993 and its bundling as part of Microsoft Office.

History

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. This promoted development of a new spreadsheet called Excel which started with the intention to, in the words of Doug Klunder, 'do everything 1-2-3 does and do it better' . The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (numbered 2.0 to line-up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) was released 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 graphical software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 11, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2003. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2004.

Early in its life Excel became the target of a trademark 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 been ignored. Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program; while this is no longer common, the program's icon still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is .xls.

Excel offers a large number of user interface tweaks; however, the essence of UI 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.

Excel was the first spreadsheet that allowed 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, while previously spreadsheets recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command. Excel has extensive graphing capabilities.

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.

Since 1993, Excel includes 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 which, in later versions, 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 (OOP) techniques.

The automation functionality which VBA provides has exposed Excel as a target for macro viruses which most antivirus solutions now block, and are becoming less common. Microsoft 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 although since version 10 onwards it appears Microsoft has taken measures to make sure such items no longer appear in their products.

Versions

Versions for Microsoft Windows include:

1987 Excel 2.0 for Windows
1990 Excel 3.0
1992 Excel 4.0
1993 Excel 5.0
1995 Excel 7.0 (Office '95)
1997 Excel 8.0 (Office '97)
1999 Excel 9.0 (Office 2000)
2001 Excel 10.0 (Office XP)
2003 Excel 11.0 (Office 2003)
2007 Excel 12.0 (Available currently only as a Beta from Microsoft Developers Network)

Versions for the Apple Macintosh include:

1985 Excel 1.0
1988 Excel 1.5
1989 Excel 2.2
1990 Excel 3.0
1992 Excel 4.0
1993 Excel 5.0
1998 Excel 8.0 (Office '98)
2000 Excel 9.0 (Office 2001)
2001 Excel 10.0 (Office v. X)
2004 Excel 11.0 (Office 2004)

Versions for OS/2 include:

1989 Excel 2.2
1991 Excel 3.0

External links

Microsoft Excel official site
Excel Easter eggs (warning: this site contains flashing adverts that epileptics may wish to avoid)
Review of first Excel version for Windows
Collection of Excel splash screens
The History of Spreadsheets
The history of Microsoft

Tutorials

APIs and tools

Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System -- official API and toolkit.
ActiveXLS -- commercial .NET and Java component to read and write Excel files.
Add-in Express -- commercial visual tool for creating Excel COM add-ins.
Excel File Repair Software -- commercial tool for repairing corrupt excel files.
Excel Chart Fixer -- free add-in to radically improve the look of Excel charts.
Apache Jakarta POI-HSSF -- OSS Java API for accessing Excel format files.
BadBlue Excel-Web by BadBlue -- commercial tool for web-enabling Excel workbooks.
VBA coding tools by CODE-VB -- commercial tool containing 19 code tools and library for fast creation of quality VBA code.
ExcelLite by GemBox Software -- commercial .NET component for accessing Excel and CSV format files.
Java Excel Interoperability: J-Integra for COM -- commercial Java to COM bi-directional bridging tool.
Java Excel API by Andy Khan -- OSS Java API for accessing Excel format files.
jXLS -- jXLS is small and easy-to-use Java library for generating Excel files using XLS templates.
KDCalc Excel compatible spreadsheet engine, converts Excel spreadsheets into web applications for HTML, Java, or .NET.
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel -- Perl module for writing Excel format files.
SpreadsheetGear -- commercial .NET components for Excel reporting, data grid and calc engine.
SsTemplates Spreadsheet Templates for Excel -- OSS Java XML templates for creating Excel documents similar to creating HTML pages with JSP and CSS.
TA-Lib -- Open source technical analysis add-in.
Xlsgen -- commercial .NET/Java/COM/C++/C component to read, write, calculate and diff Excel files.

Excel file format information

Excel Developer's Kit, Microsoft Press, 1994; Excel API, SDK and description of Excel file formats.
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel article, Perl Journal, 2000; describes the implementation of Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Excel file format.
Excel file format documentation (in progress) by the OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Project.
Chicago Project (Sourceforge), an effort to create a platform independent C library to read and write Excel files.
- Excel File Format Documentation, with source code provided to process XLS documents.
Wotsit's Format Database: XLS archives.
PHP class for reading the contents of Excel xls files .

Caveats

Excel gurus

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