When was microsoft excel created - Word и Excel - помощь в работе с программами

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft 365 suite of software.

Microsoft Excel


A simple bar graph being created in Excel, running on Windows 11
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Initial release	November 19, 1987; 35 years ago
Stable release	2103 (16.0.13901.20400) / April 13, 2021; 23 months ago^[1]
Written in	C++ (back-end)^[2]
Operating system	Microsoft Windows
Type	Spreadsheet
License	Trialware^[3]
Website	microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/excel

Microsoft Excel for Mac

Excel for Mac (version 16.67), running on macOS Big Sur 11.5.2
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Initial release	September 30, 1985; 37 years ago
Stable release	16.70 (Build 23021201) / February 14, 2023; 54 days ago^[4]
Written in	C++ (back-end), Objective-C (API/UI)^[2]
Operating system	macOS
Type	Spreadsheet
License	Proprietary commercial software
Website	products.office.com/mac

Microsoft Excel for Android

Excel for Android running on Android 13
Developer(s)	Microsoft Corporation
Stable release	16.0.14729.20146 / December 22, 2021; 15 months ago^[5]
Operating system	Android Oreo and later
Type	Spreadsheet
License	Proprietary commercial software
Website	products.office.com/en-us/excel

Microsoft Excel for iOS and iPadOS

Developer(s)	Microsoft Corporation
Stable release	2.70.1 / February 15, 2023; 53 days ago^[6]
Operating system	iOS 15 or later iPadOS 15 or later
Type	Spreadsheet
License	Proprietary commercial software
Website	products.office.com/en-us/excel

Features

Basic operation

Microsoft Excel has the basic features of all spreadsheets,^[7] using a grid of cells arranged in numbered rows and letter-named columns to organize data manipulations like arithmetic operations. It has a battery of supplied functions to answer statistical, engineering, and financial needs. In addition, it can display data as line graphs, histograms and charts, and with a very limited three-dimensional graphical display. It allows sectioning of data to view its dependencies on various factors for different perspectives (using pivot tables and the scenario manager).^[8] A PivotTable is a tool for data analysis. It does this by simplifying large data sets via PivotTable fields. It has a programming aspect, Visual Basic for Applications, allowing the user to employ a wide variety of numerical methods, for example, for solving differential equations of mathematical physics,^[9]^[10] and then reporting the results back to the spreadsheet. It also has a variety of interactive features allowing user interfaces that can completely hide the spreadsheet from the user, so the spreadsheet presents itself as a so-called application, or decision support system (DSS), via a custom-designed user interface, for example, a stock analyzer,^[11] or in general, as a design tool that asks the user questions and provides answers and reports.^[12]^[13] In a more elaborate realization, an Excel application can automatically poll external databases and measuring instruments using an update schedule,^[14] analyze the results, make a Word report or PowerPoint slide show, and e-mail these presentations on a regular basis to a list of participants. Excel was not designed to be used as a database.^{[citation needed]}

Microsoft allows for a number of optional command-line switches to control the manner in which Excel starts.^[15]

Functions

Excel 2016 has 484 functions.^[16] Of these, 360 existed prior to Excel 2010. Microsoft classifies these functions in 14 categories. Of the 484 current functions, 386 may be called from VBA as methods of the object «WorksheetFunction»^[17] and 44 have the same names as VBA functions.^[18]

With the introduction of LAMBDA, Excel will become Turing complete.^[19]

Macro programming

VBA programming

Use of a user-defined function sq(x) in Microsoft Excel. The named variables x & y are identified in the Name Manager. The function sq is introduced using the Visual Basic editor supplied with Excel.

Subroutine in Excel calculates the square of named column variable x read from the spreadsheet, and writes it into the named column variable y.

The Windows version of Excel supports programming through Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is a dialect of Visual Basic. Programming with VBA allows spreadsheet manipulation that is awkward or impossible with standard spreadsheet techniques. Programmers may write code directly using the Visual Basic Editor (VBE), which includes a window for writing code, debugging code, and code module organization environment. The user can implement numerical methods as well as automating tasks such as formatting or data organization in VBA^[20] and guide the calculation using any desired intermediate results reported back to the spreadsheet.

VBA was removed from Mac Excel 2008, as the developers did not believe that a timely release would allow porting the VBA engine natively to Mac OS X. VBA was restored in the next version, Mac Excel 2011,^[21] although the build lacks support for ActiveX objects, impacting some high level developer tools.^[22]

A common and easy way to generate VBA code is by using the Macro Recorder.^[23] The Macro Recorder records actions of the user and generates VBA code in the form of a macro. These actions can then be repeated automatically by running the macro. The macros can also be linked to different trigger types like keyboard shortcuts, a command button or a graphic. The actions in the macro can be executed from these trigger types or from the generic toolbar options. The VBA code of the macro can also be edited in the VBE. Certain features such as loop functions and screen prompt by their own properties, and some graphical display items, cannot be recorded but must be entered into the VBA module directly by the programmer. Advanced users can employ user prompts to create an interactive program, or react to events such as sheets being loaded or changed.

Macro Recorded code may not be compatible with Excel versions. Some code that is used in Excel 2010 cannot be used in Excel 2003. Making a Macro that changes the cell colors and making changes to other aspects of cells may not be backward compatible.

VBA code interacts with the spreadsheet through the Excel Object Model,^[24] a vocabulary identifying spreadsheet objects, and a set of supplied functions or methods that enable reading and writing to the spreadsheet and interaction with its users (for example, through custom toolbars or command bars and message boxes). User-created VBA subroutines execute these actions and operate like macros generated using the macro recorder, but are more flexible and efficient.

History

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.^[25] 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 was discontinued. All versions of Excel, including Excel 2021 are capable of running an XLM macro, though Microsoft discourages their use.^[26]

Charts

Graph made using Microsoft Excel

Excel supports charts, graphs, or histograms generated from specified groups of cells. It also supports Pivot Charts that allow for a chart to be linked directly to a Pivot table. This allows the chart to be refreshed with the Pivot Table. The generated graphic component can either be embedded within the current sheet or added as a separate object.

These displays are dynamically updated if the content of cells changes. For example, suppose that the important design requirements are displayed visually; then, in response to a user’s change in trial values for parameters, the curves describing the design change shape, and their points of intersection shift, assisting the selection of the best design.

Add-ins

Additional features are available using add-ins. Several are provided with Excel, including:

Analysis ToolPak: Provides data analysis tools for statistical and engineering analysis (includes analysis of variance and regression analysis)
Analysis ToolPak VBA: VBA functions for Analysis ToolPak
Euro Currency Tools: Conversion and formatting for euro currency
Solver Add-In: Tools for optimization and equation solving

Data storage and communication

Number of rows and columns

Versions of Excel up to 7.0 had a limitation in the size of their data sets of 16K (2¹⁴ = 16384) rows. Versions 8.0 through 11.0 could handle 64K (2¹⁶ = 65536) rows and 256 columns (2⁸ as label ‘IV’). Version 12.0 onwards, including the current Version 16.x, can handle over 1M (2²⁰ = 1048576) rows, and 16384 (2¹⁴, labeled as column ‘XFD’) columns.^[27]

File formats

Excel Spreadsheet

Filename extension	.xls, (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb — Excel 2007)
Internet media type	application/vnd.ms-excel
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)	com.microsoft.excel.xls
Developed by	Microsoft
Type of format	Spreadsheet

Microsoft Excel up until 2007 version used a proprietary binary file format called Excel Binary File Format (.XLS) as its primary format.^[28] Excel 2007 uses Office Open XML as its primary file format, an XML-based format that followed after a previous XML-based format called «XML Spreadsheet» («XMLSS»), first introduced in Excel 2002.^[29]

Although supporting and encouraging the use of new XML-based formats as replacements, Excel 2007 remained backwards-compatible with the traditional, binary formats. In addition, most versions of Microsoft Excel can read CSV, DBF, SYLK, DIF, and other legacy formats. Support for some older file formats was removed in Excel 2007.^[30] The file formats were mainly from DOS-based programs.

Binary

OpenOffice.org has created documentation of the Excel format. Two epochs of the format exist: the 97-2003 OLE format, and the older stream format.^[31] Microsoft has made the Excel binary format specification available to freely download.^[32]

XML Spreadsheet

The XML Spreadsheet format introduced in Excel 2002^[29] is a simple, XML based format missing some more advanced features like storage of VBA macros. Though the intended file extension for this format is .xml, the program also correctly handles XML files with .xls extension. This feature is widely used by third-party applications (e.g. MySQL Query Browser) to offer «export to Excel» capabilities without implementing binary file format. The following example will be correctly opened by Excel if saved either as Book1.xml or Book1.xls:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Workbook xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet"
 xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
 xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel"
 xmlns:ss="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet"
 xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
 <Worksheet ss:Name="Sheet1">
  <Table ss:ExpandedColumnCount="2" ss:ExpandedRowCount="2" x:FullColumns="1" x:FullRows="1">
   <Row>
    <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Name</Data></Cell>
    <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Example</Data></Cell>
   </Row>
   <Row>
    <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Value</Data></Cell>
    <Cell><Data ss:Type="Number">123</Data></Cell>
   </Row>
  </Table>
 </Worksheet>
</Workbook>

Current file extensions

Microsoft Excel 2007, along with the other products in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, introduced new file formats. The first of these (.xlsx) is defined in the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification.

Excel 2007 formats

Format	Extension	Description
Excel Workbook	`.xlsx`	The default Excel 2007 and later workbook format. In reality, a ZIP compressed archive with a directory structure of XML text documents. Functions as the primary replacement for the former binary .xls format, although it does not support Excel macros for security reasons. Saving as .xlsx offers file size reduction over .xls^[33]
Excel Macro-enabled Workbook	`.xlsm`	As Excel Workbook, but with macro support.
Excel Binary Workbook	`.xlsb`	As Excel Macro-enabled Workbook, but storing information in binary form rather than XML documents for opening and saving documents more quickly and efficiently. Intended especially for very large documents with tens of thousands of rows, and/or several hundreds of columns. This format is very useful for shrinking large Excel files as is often the case when doing data analysis.
Excel Macro-enabled Template	`.xltm`	A template document that forms a basis for actual workbooks, with macro support. The replacement for the old .xlt format.
Excel Add-in	`.xlam`	Excel add-in to add extra functionality and tools. Inherent macro support because of the file purpose.

Old file extensions

Format	Extension	Description
Spreadsheet	`.xls`	Main spreadsheet format which holds data in worksheets, charts, and macros
Add-in (VBA)	`.xla`	Adds custom functionality; written in VBA
Toolbar	`.xlb`	The file extension where Microsoft Excel custom toolbar settings are stored.
Chart	`.xlc`	A chart created with data from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that only saves the chart. To save the chart and spreadsheet save as .XLS. XLC is not supported in Excel 2007 or in any newer versions of Excel.
Dialog	`.xld`	Used in older versions of Excel.
Archive	`.xlk`	A backup of an Excel Spreadsheet
Add-in (DLL)	`.xll`	Adds custom functionality; written in C++/C, Fortran, etc. and compiled in to a special dynamic-link library
Macro	`.xlm`	A macro is created by the user or pre-installed with Excel.
Template	`.xlt`	A pre-formatted spreadsheet created by the user or by Microsoft Excel.
Module	`.xlv`	A module is written in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for Microsoft Excel
Library	`.DLL`	Code written in VBA may access functions in a DLL, typically this is used to access the Windows API
Workspace	`.xlw`	Arrangement of the windows of multiple Workbooks

Using other Windows applications

Windows applications such as Microsoft Access and Microsoft Word, as well as Excel can communicate with each other and use each other’s capabilities. The most common are Dynamic Data Exchange: although strongly deprecated by Microsoft, this is a common method to send data between applications running on Windows, with official MS publications referring to it as «the protocol from hell».^[34] As the name suggests, it allows applications to supply data to others for calculation and display. It is very common in financial markets, being used to connect to important financial data services such as Bloomberg and Reuters.

OLE Object Linking and Embedding allows a Windows application to control another to enable it to format or calculate data. This may take on the form of «embedding» where an application uses another to handle a task that it is more suited to, for example a PowerPoint presentation may be embedded in an Excel spreadsheet or vice versa.^[35]^[36]^[37]^[38]

Using external data

Excel users can access external data sources via Microsoft Office features such as (for example) .odc connections built with the Office Data Connection file format. Excel files themselves may be updated using a Microsoft supplied ODBC driver.

Excel can accept data in real-time through several programming interfaces, which allow it to communicate with many data sources such as Bloomberg and Reuters (through addins such as Power Plus Pro).

DDE: «Dynamic Data Exchange» uses the message passing mechanism in Windows to allow data to flow between Excel and other applications. Although it is easy for users to create such links, programming such links reliably is so difficult that Microsoft, the creators of the system, officially refer to it as «the protocol from hell».^[34] In spite of its many issues DDE remains the most common way for data to reach traders in financial markets.
Network DDE Extended the protocol to allow spreadsheets on different computers to exchange data. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft no longer supports the facility.^[39]
Real Time Data: RTD although in many ways technically superior to DDE, has been slow to gain acceptance, since it requires non-trivial programming skills, and when first released was neither adequately documented nor supported by the major data vendors.^[40]^[41]

Alternatively, Microsoft Query provides ODBC-based browsing within Microsoft Excel.^[42]^[43]^[44]

Export and migration of spreadsheets

Programmers have produced APIs to open Excel spreadsheets in a variety of applications and environments other than Microsoft Excel. These include opening Excel documents on the web using either ActiveX controls, or plugins like the Adobe Flash Player. The Apache POI opensource project provides Java libraries for reading and writing Excel spreadsheet files.

Password protection

Microsoft Excel protection offers several types of passwords:

Password to open a document^[45]
Password to modify a document^[46]
Password to unprotect the worksheet
Password to protect workbook
Password to protect the sharing workbook^[47]

All passwords except password to open a document can be removed instantly regardless of the Microsoft Excel version used to create the document. These types of passwords are used primarily for shared work on a document. Such password-protected documents are not encrypted, and a data sources from a set password is saved in a document’s header. Password to protect workbook is an exception – when it is set, a document is encrypted with the standard password «VelvetSweatshop», but since it is known to the public, it actually does not add any extra protection to the document. The only type of password that can prevent a trespasser from gaining access to a document is password to open a document. The cryptographic strength of this kind of protection depends strongly on the Microsoft Excel version that was used to create the document.

In Microsoft Excel 95 and earlier versions, the password to open is converted to a 16-bit key that can be instantly cracked. In Excel 97/2000 the password is converted to a 40-bit key, which can also be cracked very quickly using modern equipment. As regards services that use rainbow tables (e.g. Password-Find), it takes up to several seconds to remove protection. In addition, password-cracking programs can brute-force attack passwords at a rate of hundreds of thousands of passwords a second, which not only lets them decrypt a document but also find the original password.

In Excel 2003/XP the encryption is slightly better – a user can choose any encryption algorithm that is available in the system (see Cryptographic Service Provider). Due to the CSP, an Excel file cannot be decrypted, and thus the password to open cannot be removed, though the brute-force attack speed remains quite high. Nevertheless, the older Excel 97/2000 algorithm is set by the default. Therefore, users who do not change the default settings lack reliable protection of their documents.

The situation changed fundamentally in Excel 2007, where the modern AES algorithm with a key of 128 bits started being used for decryption, and a 50,000-fold use of the hash function SHA1 reduced the speed of brute-force attacks down to hundreds of passwords per second. In Excel 2010, the strength of the protection by the default was increased two times due to the use of a 100,000-fold SHA1 to convert a password to a key.

Other platforms

Excel for mobile

Excel Mobile is a spreadsheet program that can edit XLSX files. It can edit and format text in cells, calculate formulas, search within the spreadsheet, sort rows and columns, freeze panes, filter the columns, add comments, and create charts. It cannot add columns or rows except at the edge of the document, rearrange columns or rows, delete rows or columns, or add spreadsheet tabs.^[48]^[49]^[50]^[51]^[52]^[53] The 2007 version has the ability to use a full-screen mode to deal with limited screen resolution, as well as split panes to view different parts of a worksheet at one time.^[51] Protection settings, zoom settings, autofilter settings, certain chart formatting, hidden sheets, and other features are not supported on Excel Mobile, and will be modified upon opening and saving a workbook.^[52] In 2015, Excel Mobile became available for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile on Windows Store.^[54]^[55]

Excel for the web

Excel for the web is a free lightweight version of Microsoft Excel available as part of Office on the web, which also includes web versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Excel for the web can display most of the features available in the desktop versions of Excel, although it may not be able to insert or edit them. Certain data connections are not accessible on Excel for the web, including with charts that may use these external connections. Excel for the web also cannot display legacy features, such as Excel 4.0 macros or Excel 5.0 dialog sheets. There are also small differences between how some of the Excel functions work.^[56]

Microsoft Excel Viewer

Microsoft Excel Viewer was a freeware program for Microsoft Windows for viewing and printing spreadsheet documents created by Excel.^[57] Microsoft retired the viewer in April 2018 with the last security update released in February 2019 for Excel Viewer 2007 (SP3).^[58]^[59]

The first version released by Microsoft was Excel 97 Viewer.^[60]^[61] Excel 97 Viewer was supported in Windows CE for Handheld PCs.^[62] In October 2004, Microsoft released Excel Viewer 2003.^[63] In September 2007, Microsoft released Excel Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3).^[64] In January 2008, Microsoft released Excel Viewer 2007 (featuring a non-collapsible Ribbon interface).^[65] In April 2009, Microsoft released Excel Viewer 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2).^[66] In October 2011, Microsoft released Excel Viewer 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3).^[67]

Microsoft advises to view and print Excel files for free to use the Excel Mobile application for Windows 10 and for Windows 7 and Windows 8 to upload the file to OneDrive and use Excel for the web with a Microsoft account to open them in a browser.^[58]^[68]

Quirks

In addition to issues with spreadsheets in general, other problems specific to Excel include numeric precision, misleading statistics functions, mod function errors, date limitations and more.

Numeric precision

Excel maintains 15 figures in its numbers, but they are not always accurate: the bottom line should be the same as the top line.

Despite the use of 15-figure precision, Excel can display many more figures (up to thirty) upon user request. But the displayed figures are not those actually used in its computations, and so, for example, the difference of two numbers may differ from the difference of their displayed values. Although such departures are usually beyond the 15th decimal, exceptions do occur, especially for very large or very small numbers. Serious errors can occur if decisions are made based upon automated comparisons of numbers (for example, using the Excel If function), as equality of two numbers can be unpredictable.^{[citation needed]}

In the figure, the fraction 1/9000 is displayed in Excel. Although this number has a decimal representation that is an infinite string of ones, Excel displays only the leading 15 figures. In the second line, the number one is added to the fraction, and again Excel displays only 15 figures. In the third line, one is subtracted from the sum using Excel. Because the sum in the second line has only eleven 1’s after the decimal, the difference when 1 is subtracted from this displayed value is three 0’s followed by a string of eleven 1’s. However, the difference reported by Excel in the third line is three 0’s followed by a string of thirteen 1’s and two extra erroneous digits. This is because Excel calculates with about half a digit more than it displays.

Excel works with a modified 1985 version of the IEEE 754 specification.^[69] Excel’s implementation involves conversions between binary and decimal representations, leading to accuracy that is on average better than one would expect from simple fifteen digit precision, but that can be worse. See the main article for details.

Besides accuracy in user computations, the question of accuracy in Excel-provided functions may be raised. Particularly in the arena of statistical functions, Excel has been criticized for sacrificing accuracy for speed of calculation.^[70]^[71]

As many calculations in Excel are executed using VBA, an additional issue is the accuracy of VBA, which varies with variable type and user-requested precision.^[72]

Statistical functions

The accuracy and convenience of statistical tools in Excel has been criticized,^[73]^[74]^[75]^[76]^[77] as mishandling missing data, as returning incorrect values due to inept handling of round-off and large numbers, as only selectively updating calculations on a spreadsheet when some cell values are changed, and as having a limited set of statistical tools. Microsoft has announced some of these issues are addressed in Excel 2010.^[78]

Excel MOD function error

Excel has issues with modulo operations. In the case of excessively large results, Excel will return the error warning #NUM! instead of an answer.^[79]

Fictional leap day in the year 1900

Excel includes February 29, 1900, incorrectly treating 1900 as a leap year, even though e.g. 2100 is correctly treated as a non-leap year.^[80]^[81] The bug originated from Lotus 1-2-3 (deliberately implemented to save computer memory), and was also purposely implemented in Excel, for the purpose of bug compatibility.^[82] This legacy has later been carried over into Office Open XML file format.^[83]

Thus a (not necessarily whole) number greater than or equal to 61 interpreted as a date and time are the (real) number of days after December 30, 1899, 0:00, a non-negative number less than 60 is the number of days after December 31, 1899, 0:00, and numbers with whole part 60 represent the fictional day.

Date range

Excel supports dates with years in the range 1900–9999, except that December 31, 1899, can be entered as 0 and is displayed as 0-jan-1900.

Converting a fraction of a day into hours, minutes and days by treating it as a moment on the day January 1, 1900, does not work for a negative fraction.^[84]

Conversion problems

Entering text that happens to be in a form that is interpreted as a date, the text can be unintentionally changed to a standard date format. A similar problem occurs when a text happens to be in the form of a floating-point notation of a number. In these cases the original exact text cannot be recovered from the result. Formatting the cell as TEXT before entering ambiguous text prevents Excel from converting to a date.

This issue has caused a well known problem in the analysis of DNA, for example in bioinformatics. As first reported in 2004,^[85] genetic scientists found that Excel automatically and incorrectly converts certain gene names into dates. A follow-up study in 2016 found many peer reviewed scientific journal papers had been affected and that «Of the selected journals, the proportion of published articles with Excel files containing gene lists that are affected by gene name errors is 19.6 %.»^[86] Excel parses the copied and pasted data and sometimes changes them depending on what it thinks they are. For example, MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type finger 1) gets converted to the date March 1 (1-Mar) and SEPT2 (Septin 2) is converted into September 2 (2-Sep) etc.^[87] While some secondary news sources^[88] reported this as a fault with Excel, the original authors of the 2016 paper placed the blame with the researchers misusing Excel.^[86]^[89]

In August 2020 the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) published new guidelines in the journal Nature regarding gene naming in order to avoid issues with «symbols that affect data handling and retrieval.» So far 27 genes have been renamed, including changing MARCH1 to MARCHF1 and SEPT1 to SEPTIN1 in order to avoid accidental conversion of the gene names into dates.^[90]

Errors with large strings

The following functions return incorrect results when passed a string longer than 255 characters:^[91]

type() incorrectly returns 16, meaning «Error value»
IsText(), when called as a method of the VBA object WorksheetFunction (i.e., WorksheetFunction.IsText() in VBA), incorrectly returns «false».

Filenames

Microsoft Excel will not open two documents with the same name and instead will display the following error:

A document with the name ‘%s’ is already open. You cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are in different folders. To open the second document, either close the document that is currently open, or rename one of the documents.^[92]

The reason is for calculation ambiguity with linked cells. If there is a cell ='[Book1.xlsx]Sheet1'!$G$33, and there are two books named «Book1» open, there is no way to tell which one the user means.^[93]

Versions

Early history

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) on November 19, 1987.^[94]^[95] Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by the early 1990s, Excel had started to outsell 1-2-3 and helped Microsoft achieve its position as a leading PC software developer. This accomplishment solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing GUI software. Microsoft maintained its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so.

Microsoft Windows

Excel 2.0 is the first version of Excel for the Intel platform. Versions prior to 2.0 were only available on the Apple Macintosh.

Excel 2.0 (1987)

The first Windows version was labeled «2» to correspond to the Mac version. It was announced on October 6, 1987, and released on November 19.^[96] This included a run-time version of Windows.^[97]

BYTE in 1989 listed Excel for Windows as among the «Distinction» winners of the BYTE Awards. The magazine stated that the port of the «extraordinary» Macintosh version «shines», with a user interface as good as or better than the original.

Excel 3.0 (1990)

Included toolbars, drawing capabilities, outlining, add-in support, 3D charts, and many more new features.^[97]

Excel 4.0 (1992)

Introduced auto-fill.^[98]

Also, an easter egg in Excel 4.0 reveals a hidden animation of a dancing set of numbers 1 through 3, representing Lotus 1-2-3, which is then crushed by an Excel logo.^[99]

Excel 5.0 (1993)

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 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», a Doom-like minigame, although since version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented features from their products.^[100]

5.0 was released in a 16-bit x86 version for Windows 3.1 and later in a 32-bit version for NT 3.51 (x86/Alpha/PowerPC)

Excel 95 (v7.0)

Released in 1995 with Microsoft Office for Windows 95, this is the first major version after Excel 5.0, as there is no Excel 6.0 with all of the Office applications standardizing on the same major version number.

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

Excel 95 contained a hidden Doom-like mini-game called «The Hall of Tortured Souls», a series of rooms featuring the names and faces of the developers as an easter egg.^[101]

Excel 97 (v8.0)

Included in Office 97 (for x86 and Alpha). This was a major upgrade that introduced the paper clip office assistant and featured standard VBA used instead of internal Excel Basic. It introduced the now-removed Natural Language labels.

This version of Excel includes a flight simulator as an Easter Egg.

Excel 2000 (v9.0)

Included in Office 2000. This was a minor upgrade but introduced an upgrade to the clipboard where it can hold multiple objects at once. The Office Assistant, whose frequent unsolicited appearance in Excel 97 had annoyed many users, became less intrusive.

A small 3-D game called «Dev Hunter» (inspired by Spy Hunter) was included as an easter egg.^[102]^[103]

Excel 2002 (v10.0)

Included in Office XP. Very minor enhancements.

Excel 2003 (v11.0)

Included in Office 2003. Minor enhancements.

Excel 2007 (v12.0)

Included in Office 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 was different from what users were used to, and was met with mixed reactions. One study reported fairly good acceptance by users except highly experienced users and users of word processing applications with a classical WIMP interface, but was less convinced in terms of efficiency and organization.^[104] However, an online survey reported that a majority of respondents had a negative opinion of the change, with advanced users being «somewhat more negative» than intermediate users, and users reporting a self-estimated reduction in productivity.

Added functionality included Tables,^[105] and the SmartArt set of editable business diagrams. Also added was an improved management of named variables through the Name Manager, and much-improved flexibility in formatting graphs, which allow (x, y) coordinate labeling and lines of arbitrary weight. Several improvements to pivot tables were introduced.

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.^[106]

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. 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 (v14.0)

Microsoft Excel 2010 running on Windows 7

Included in Office 2010, this is the next major version after v12.0, as version number 13 was skipped.

Minor enhancements and 64-bit support,^[107] including the following:

Multi-threading recalculation (MTR) for commonly used functions
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^[108]

Excel 2013 (v15.0)

Included in Office 2013, along with a lot of new tools included in this release:

Improved Multi-threading and Memory Contention
FlashFill^[109]
Power View^[110]
Power Pivot^[111]
Timeline Slicer
Windows App
Inquire^[112]
50 new functions^[113]

Excel 2016 (v16.0)

Included in Office 2016, along with a lot of new tools included in this release:

Power Query integration
Read-only mode for Excel
Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel
New Chart Types
Quick data linking in Visio
Excel forecasting functions
Support for multiselection of Slicer items using touch
Time grouping and Pivot Chart Drill Down
Excel data cards^[114]

Excel 2019, Excel 2021, Office 365 and subsequent (v16.0)

Microsoft no longer releases Office or Excel in discrete versions. Instead, features are introduced automatically over time using Windows Update. The version number remains 16.0. Thereafter only the approximate dates when features appear can now be given.

Dynamic Arrays. These are essentially Array Formulas but they «Spill» automatically into neighboring cells and does not need the ctrl-shift-enter to create them. Further, dynamic arrays are the default format, with new «@» and «#» operators to provide compatibility with previous versions. This is perhaps the biggest structural change since 2007, and is in response to a similar feature in Google Sheets. Dynamic arrays started appearing in pre-releases about 2018, and as of March 2020 are available in published versions of Office 365 provided a user selected «Office Insiders».

Apple Macintosh

Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011

1985 Excel 1.0
1988 Excel 1.5
1989 Excel 2.2
1990 Excel 3.0
1992 Excel 4.0
1993 Excel 5.0 (part of Office 4.x—Final Motorola 680×0 version^[115] and first PowerPC version)
1998 Excel 8.0 (part of Office 98)
2000 Excel 9.0 (part of Office 2001)
2001 Excel 10.0 (part of Office v. X)
2004 Excel 11.0 (part of Office 2004)
2008 Excel 12.0 (part of Office 2008)
2010 Excel 14.0 (part of Office 2011)
2015 Excel 15.0 (part of Office 2016—Office 2016 for Mac brings the Mac version much closer to parity with its Windows cousin, harmonizing many of the reporting and high-level developer functions, while bringing the ribbon and styling into line with its PC counterpart.)^[116]

OS/2

1989 Excel 2.2
1990 Excel 2.3
1991 Excel 3.0

Summary

Legend:	Old version, not maintained	Older version, still maintained	Current stable version

Microsoft Excel for Windows release history

Year	Name	Version	Comments
1987	Excel 2	2.0	Renumbered to 2 to correspond with contemporary Macintosh version. Supported macros (later known as Excel 4 macros).
1990	Excel 3	3.0	Added 3D graphing capabilities
1992	Excel 4	4.0	Introduced auto-fill feature
1993	Excel 5	5.0	Included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and various object-oriented options
1995	Excel 95	7.0	Renumbered for contemporary Word version. Both programs were packaged in Microsoft Office by this time.
1997	Excel 97	8.0
2000	Excel 2000	9.0	Part of Microsoft Office 2000, which was itself part of Windows Millennium (also known as «Windows ME»).
2002	Excel 2002	10.0
2003	Excel 2003	11.0	Released only 1 year later to correspond better with the rest of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, etc.).
2007	Excel 2007	12.0
2010	Excel 2010	14.0	Due to superstitions surrounding the number 13, Excel 13 was skipped in version counting.
2013	Excel 2013	15.0	Introduced 50 more mathematical functions (available as pre-packaged commands, rather than typing the formula manually).
2016	Excel 2016	16.0	Part of Microsoft Office 2016

Microsoft Excel for Macintosh release history

Year	Name	Version	Comments
1985	Excel 1	1.0	Initial version of Excel. Supported macros (later known as Excel 4 macros).
1988	Excel 1.5	1.5
1989	Excel 2	2.2
1990	Excel 3	3.0
1992	Excel 4	4.0
1993	Excel 5	5.0	Only available on PowerPC-based Macs. First PowerPC version.
1998	Excel 98	8.0	Excel 6 and Excel 7 were skipped to correspond with the rest of Microsoft Office at the time.
2000	Excel 2000	9.0
2001	Excel 2001	10.0
2004	Excel 2004	11.0
2008	Excel 2008	12.0
2011	Excel 2011	14.0	As with the Windows version, version 13 was skipped for superstitious reasons.
2016	Excel 2016	16.0	As with the rest of Microsoft Office, so it is for Excel: Future release dates for the Macintosh version are intended to correspond better to those for the Windows version, from 2016 onward.

Microsoft Excel for OS/2 release history

Year	Name	Version	Comments
1989	Excel 2.2	2.2	Numbered in between Windows versions at the time
1990	Excel 2.3	2.3
1991	Excel 3	3.0	Last OS/2 version. Discontinued subseries of Microsoft Excel, which is otherwise still an actively developed program.

Impact

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 2.0 for Windows, which was modeled after its Mac GUI-based counterpart, indirectly expanded the installed base of the then-nascent Windows environment. Excel 2.0 was released a month before Windows 2.0, and the installed base of Windows was so low at that point in 1987 that Microsoft had to bundle a runtime version of Windows 1.0 with Excel 2.0.^[117] Unlike Microsoft Word, there never was a DOS version of Excel.

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 re-computation, 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 introduced auto-fill, the ability to drag and expand the selection box to automatically copy a cell or row contents to adjacent cells or rows, adjusting the copies intelligently by automatically incrementing cell references or contents. Excel also introduced extensive graphing capabilities.

Security

Because Excel is widely used, it has been attacked by hackers. While Excel is not directly exposed to the Internet, if an attacker can get a victim to open a file in Excel, and there is an appropriate security bug in Excel, then the attacker can gain control of the victim’s computer.^[118] UK’s GCHQ has a tool named TORNADO ALLEY with this purpose.^[119]^[120]

Games

Besides the easter eggs, numerous games have been created or recreated in Excel, such as Tetris, 2048, Scrabble, Yahtzee, Angry Birds, Pac-Man, Civilization, Monopoly, Battleship, Blackjack, Space Invaders, and others.^[121]^[122]^[123]^[124]^[125]

In 2020, Excel became an esport with the advent of the Financial Modeling World Cup.^[126]

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References

Bullen, Stephen; Bovey, Rob; Green, John (2009). Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel and VBA (2nd ed.). Boston: Addison Wesley. ISBN 978-0-321-50879-9.
Dodge, Mark; Stinson, Craig (2007). Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Inside Out. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press. ISBN 978-0-7356-2321-7.
Billo, E. Joseph (2011). Excel for Chemists: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-38123-6.
Gordon, Andy (January 25, 2021). «LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function». microsoft.com. Microsoft. Retrieved April 23, 2021.

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Excel

Microsoft Excel – official site

Источник

Содержание

Excel works!
Excel works!
Кто создал Excel?
Кто создал Excel?
Что же делают эти гениальные люди — кто создал Excel сейчас?
Who Created Microsoft Excel?
Who is the founder of Excel?
Did Bill Gates create Excel?
Who invented Excel and Word?
When was Microsoft Excel created?
Who is the real owner of Microsoft?
Who is the father of Microsoft Office?
Did Bill Gates steal Microsoft from jobs?
Why did Microsoft develop Excel?
Does Microsoft Excel have history?
Did Bill Gates sell Microsoft?
Who is the billionaire owner of Microsoft?
What is the salary of Microsoft owner?
Who is the first CEO of Microsoft?
Who is the owner of office?
Who founded MS Word?
Did Microsoft steal Excel?
Was Bill Gates jealous of Steve Jobs?
Did Gates steal Apple?
Why is Excel called Excel?
An Ode to Excel: 34 Years of Magic
A Year in Excel
Talk About Ubiquity
Changing the Course of History
Imagining a World Without Excel
The History of Excel
34 Years of Magic
Recalc or Die
Spotting the Next Excel
Subscribe to Steph | Smith
Steph Smith
Must-Have Qualities for Effective Leadership
Finding Top Talent: Stop Looking Inside a Box for People Thinking Outside of One

Excel works!

Excel работает за вас

Excel works!

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Кто создал Excel?

Билл Гейтс представляет Excel для Windows в 1987 году.

Кто создал Excel?

Сколько раз в день вы пользуетесь эксель? Мне кажется, что у меня он открыт постоянно. Зачем нужен калькулятор, если есть такой редактор таблиц. А задумывались ли вы, кто создал эту без малого великую программу? Ведь сколько бизнес-проектов было запущено или оптимизировано при помощи него! Какую роль простой табличный редактор может сыграть в научно технической революции?

В прекрасной книге Уильяма Паундстоуна « Как сдвинуть гору Фудзи? » рассказывается о становлении методов подбора персонала. В одной из глав упоминается, как развивалась индустрия управления разработкой программ и введение должности мастер-программист.

«Титул «мастер-программист» никогда широко не использовался — уж слишком патриархально он звучал даже для компании, переполненной «визжащими доминантными мужскими особями», поэтому название изменили на более нейтральное — «менеджер программы». Теперь именно оно стало стандартным для всей отрасли программного обеспечения, но сегодняшним пониманием обязанностей менеджеров программ мы в основном обязаны создателю электронных таблиц Excel Джейбу Блюменталю (Jabe Blumenthal).»

Оказывается, что помимо того, что человек играл ключевую роль в создании Excel, еще он стал основоположником методов управления проектами в разработки программ.

Так же одним из ключевых разработчиков был Дуг Кландер (Doug Klunder) написавший порядка 30% кода первого продукта. Команда Кландера собралась в небольшом отеле города Белвью, чтобы разработать концепцию решения. У них было 3 дня и большой бумажный планшет для создания табличного редактора.

Вот как описывает он сам процесс создания Excel.

«Было две основные цели, которые мы должны были достичь. Первая, простота занесения информации. Вторая, и сейчас это звучит очень странно, максимально быстрый расчет и пересчет ячеек»

Поэтому команде Klunder’а пришлось разработать концепцию умного пересчета ячеек — когда рассчитываются только те ячейки, в которых были произведены изменения. Создатели до сих пор считают, что это было определяющим решением.

Как ни странно это может сейчас показаться, но первая версия Microsoft Excel была разработана для Apple Macintosh. Изначально это должна была быть программа для DOS, но постепенно начиналась эра графических интерфейсов — Mac дебютировал в 1984 году, в то время как Microsoft отставал от них. А Excel — это в первую очередь графика, и было принято решение перейти на Mac — эти перемены даже заставляют Klunder’а, временно оставить работу в Microsoft. К счастью для проекта, он вернулся.

Советую прочитать интереснейшую статью на эту тему.

Что же делают эти гениальные люди — кто создал Excel сейчас?

Jabe Blumenthal — один из первых дизайнеров программы в 80-х, найти про него информацию достаточно сложно, т.к. он давно не работает IT, а занимается обучением параглайдингу — полету на парашютах и участвует в относительно небольших проектах.

Doug Klunder — руководитель группы разработчиков Excel из 3 человек, на настоящий момент является директором Вашингтонского проекта Американского союза защиты гражданских свобод (ACLU of Washington’s Privacy Project). Организация обеспечивает юридическую помощь в судебных процессах, исход которых мог бы, по мнению ACLU, привести к ущемлению гражданских прав и свобод.

P.S. И напоследок видео. «Билл Гейтс представляет первый табличный редактор для Microsoft».

Источник

Who Created Microsoft Excel?

The electronic spreadsheet was essentially invented in 1979 by software pioneer Dan Bricklin, who started up Software Arts with Bob Frankston and created VisiCalc.

Who is the founder of Excel?

Charles Simonyi
Notable work	Microsoft Office
Spouse(s)	Lisa Persdotter ( m. 2008)
Children	2
Parents	Károly Simonyi (father) Zsuzsa Simonyi (mother)

Did Bill Gates create Excel?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates unveiled the original version of Excel at a presentation in New York. The first version of the software was only compatible with Macintosh computers, and received a glowing endorsement from Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs.Excel wasn’t the first spreadsheet software.

Who invented Excel and Word?

Charles Simonyi
Hungarian Roots: Charles Simonyi, The Inventor Of Microsoft Excel And Word And The Second Hungarian Who Traveled In The Space. Robert Velkey 2016.10. 06.

When was Microsoft Excel created?

Who is the real owner of Microsoft?

Bill Gates founded the software company Microsoft Corporation with his friend Paul Allen. He also cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund global health and development programs.

Who is the father of Microsoft Office?

Bill Gates Sr., Father Of Microsoft Co-Founder, Dies At 94.

Did Bill Gates steal Microsoft from jobs?

But can you say he stole Steve Jobs idea? No. Bill Gates build a software operating system to sell and license it. His concept was open software.

Why did Microsoft develop Excel?

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 ‘do everything 1-2-3 does and do it better’.

Does Microsoft Excel have history?

By default, Excel keeps the change history for 30 days. If you open an edited workbook, say, in 40 days, you will see the change history for all 40 days, but only until you close the workbook. After closing the workbook, any changes older than 30 days will be gone.

Did Bill Gates sell Microsoft?

on Oct. 29. Gates’s 1998 holding would have been valued Friday at about $693 billion, topping Musk’s net worth of $340.4 billion and Bezos’s net worth of $200.3 billion. He sold the vast majority of his Microsoft stock before leaving the board in 2020.

Who is the billionaire owner of Microsoft?

Microsoft became the world’s largest personal computer software company. Allen was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death.

Paul Allen
Years active	1972–2018
Known for	Co-founder of Microsoft

What is the salary of Microsoft owner?

Usa Today Dec 2020: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made $42.9 million in the 2019 fiscal year, more than all but two other CEOs of the 100 largest companies in the United States and 66% more than he made the year before. The increase was largely attributable to the value of stock options he was awarded.

Who is the first CEO of Microsoft?

Bill Gates developed a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 while a student at Harvard. With the success of BASIC, he and co-developer Paul Allen founded Microsoft.

Who is the owner of office?

Confirmed: Microsoft Is The New Owner Of Office.com – TechCrunch.

Who founded MS Word?

Charles Simonyi
Who invented Microsoft Word? Software developers Richard Brodie and Charles Simonyi released the Multi-Tool Word for the UNIX operating system in 1983. Later that year, the program was rewritten to run on personal computers under MS-DOS and was renamed Microsoft Word.

Did Microsoft steal Excel?

$8.9m damages. Microsoft has been found guilty of patent infringement and ordered to pay a Guatamalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado almost $9m in damages. The US District Court of Central California court ruled that Microsoft had infringed on his intellectual property and ordered it to pay him $8.96m.

Was Bill Gates jealous of Steve Jobs?

“He was such a wizard at over-motivating people — I was a minor wizard so I couldn’t fall under his spells — but I could see him casting the spells, and then I would look at people and see them mesmerized,” Gates says in the interview.”I was so jealous.”

Did Gates steal Apple?

To save Apple, then known as Apple Computer from bankruptcy, Bill Gates bought $150 million of non-voting shares in Apple Computer and offered Apple free-access to use Microsoft Office, which at the time was the primary software computer users demanded, on Mac PCs.

Why is Excel called Excel?

The name of Excel was picked to give impression of ‘It can do everything Lotus 123 does, but exceptionally better’. Microsoft was initially developed Multiplan, a spreadsheet program for CP/M system but unfortunately in MS-DOS, Multiplan was losing to Lotus 123.

Источник

An Ode to Excel: 34 Years of Magic

In an age where «software is eating the world», what can we learn from the tool that has withstood the test of time? This piece illustrates how the fundamentals behind Excel can be used to envision the next wave of bulletproof technologies.

2015: I love you
2016: I love you
2017: I love you
2018: I love you
2019: I love you

One “I love you” for every year since I’ve fallen in love with. Microsoft Excel?

You may be surprised to know that I’m not the first to write a love letter to Excel (or to use it to create one), nor to confess an Excel addiction. But in an age where software is “eating the world”, I want to talk about the tool that has withstood the test of time.

A Year in Excel

Just like many other “relationships”, I was introduced to Excel a few years prior, but the fire was lit in 2015. I jokingly say it was the “year of the spreadsheet” because I spent the greater part of that year living in one.

I worked as a business analyst crunching numbers for the Fortune 500. I vividly remember being told on my first day to notice how the other, more seasoned consultants didn’t use their computer mice as they navigated their spreadsheets. Their circuitry had turned the combinations of CTRL+[insert keystroke] into muscle memory. Soon, that too would be me.

In the years prior, I thought my ability to create a scatter plot with a trendline meant I was proficient with the tool. But that year, I was exposed to the immense power of Excel. We used the tool to build complex models that would predict anything from the price of oil years out to the minimization of real estate cannibalization. Everything we built was deeply complicated and proprietary, yet also only with a single tool: Excel.

During my 11 months in that job, I estimate that I spent over 1500 hours in Excel. For perspective, there are less than 6000 hours in total across those workdays; including sleep and whatever else I managed to fit in around Excel. (You better bet I calculated that with a spreadsheet)

To be clear, I don’t regret a minute of this. But I do want to reflect on it.

As technology becomes more omnipresent in our lives, we’ve started to champion the technologists behind these inventions. We write about the latest gadgets and SaaS companies as if they will change the course of history, while VCs are willing to bet millions on the next cohort. Simply consider how Musk, Zuckerberg, Page, and Bezos have all become as common as celebrity names in the household.

But I want to talk about Daniel Bricklin and Doug Klunder, or the piece of software that despite being invented over 30 years ago, lives on hundreds of millions of machines. I want to talk about a tool that spurred entirely new industries and still remains the biggest competitor to many new-age companies.

Even after decades of innovation, I want to talk about Excel.

Talk About Ubiquity

Whether you like Excel or not, it’s hard to dispute that it has been a major underpinning to modern-day business.

Just in terms of sheer market penetration, Microsoft believes that 1 in 5 adults use Excel. And despite recent advances by competitors like Google sheets, it is estimated that there may still be 1.2B Microsoft Office licenses floating around. Compare the $13.8B that MS Office raked in over 2016 relative to GSuite’s $1.3B, and you get a sense of the sustained market dominance.

But what’s even more impressive about this feat is that we’re talking about software that was introduced over 3 decades ago. And despite the numerous updates and creation of now 476 functions, the concepts behind Excel and even some of the original code still remain. (More on this later)

“You’d think that there wouldn’t be any code from 15, 20, 30 years ago, but a lot of it still is.” — Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

You would expect this age-old software to be obsolete by now, but instead it’s thriving. A simple search on Udemy for “Excel” generates more than 10000 results, compared to the 7000 for Javascript. It’s also apparently the number one skill mentioned in job ads, finding its way into every 1 in 3. And if we accept the fundamental nature of spreadsheets in that they are indeed programs, Excel remains the most popular software development environment in the world.

“Microsoft Excel is the most familiar, flexible, and widely used business application in the world due to its capability to adapt to almost any business process.” — The History of Microsoft Excel

The combination of insane backwards compatibility (30+ years!), a gentle learning curve, and almost complete interoperability has resulted in Excel being a market leader for far longer than many companies could ever imagine. Perhaps most principally, people can trust that they can use the program completely out of the box. No dependencies, no boilerplate; it just works.

So despite hundreds of new Microsoft products having been released since Excel’s inception, CEO Satya Nadella still thinks its spreadsheet product stands out.

“Think about a world without Excel. That’s just impossible for me.” — Satya Nadella

Changing the Course of History

Albeit a bit dramatic, Microsoft Excel fundamentally changed the way people run their lives and their businesses.

Personally, I do everything in spreadsheets. I track my life (ranging from how often I exercise to how often I floss), I create lists, I project my finances, and much more. The beauty of spreadsheets are in the fundamentals, which is exactly why the tool can be translated into dozens of practical uses.

At its core, Excel did and still does something very fundamental. It took something previously reserved for a select few﹣intensive numerical analysis and made it accessible, and even enjoyable, for the rest of the world.

“Excel actually changed the way business works, really by making it easy for people to use and to be able to make decisions and do calculations and put charts on their data” — Derek Burney, Corp VP Data and BI, VP — Data and Business Intelligence

Although Excel didn’t fundamentally invent the spreadsheet (we’ll get into that later), it was the vehicle to take dynamic computation into the mainstream. Zuck wasn’t the first guy to build a social network, nor was Musk the only dude to think we can make commercial space expedition possible. But they are the ones building such things at scale, just as Excel took the concept of the spreadsheet and delivered it to the world.

The advent of MS Excel was one of those era-defining innovations; one that “launched thousands of startups and justified millions of layoffs”, and has now stimulated entirely new industries. Simply consider the swath of job titles that have emerged in business analytics, just like the one I spent the greater part of 2015 in. These exact jobs didn’t exist until Excel enabled us to process and visualize data; to play around with the “what ifs”.

“Corporations and organizations have a lot of information or data that’s in back-end systems, and we need to be able to empower people to look at that data, twist it around, analyze it, pivot it, and examine it in different ways so that they can uncover some insight. So, Excel plays a tremendous role in the whole business intelligence world, by virtue of the fact that it’s the tool that people use. It’s the one that they actually touch.” — Derek Burney, Corp VP Data and BI, VP — Data and Business Intelligence

Entire companies are completely built off of the back of Excel. And for those where Excel isn’t mission critical, it’s almost always still part of the mission. What’s both insane yet also incredible, is that new companies are still emerging in 2019 which still have Excel as their biggest competitor.

Most startup companies’ fiercest competitor? Personal spreadsheets already solving 90% of the problem.

And even as numerous new technologies have emerged and businesses raise $Ms of dollars, people still opt for Excel. According to a Gartner study in 2015, more than half of IT leaders said they “mostly” or “completely” opt for spreadsheets when performing analysis. This only indicates the explicit competition Excel poses on the data analytics industry, but doesn’t convey the limitless application that people use the tool for: building todo lists, exercise logs, inventory sheets, and much more. Even Excel used their product to generate the RSVP list for their 30th year celebration.

“Spreadsheets are used for everything. From light-weight databases, to todo-lists and scheduling, data gathering, data analysis, and sophisticated business processing. These are all examples of common uses for spreadsheet software, and this is obviously by no means a comprehensive list of the things spreadsheets are used for.” — Hjalmar Gislason

Imagining a World Without Excel

“[I was] sitting next to a person on a plane and started talking and they grabbed me by the shirt, “You work on Excel? I love Excel!”” — Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

People (like me) don’t just use Excel. They love it. And as I was researching for this article, I stumbled on a simple question: “If Excel disappeared, what would you use?”

For some of the simpler solutions it provides, there are certainly parallels. But for its more complicated applications, I’m not sure whether there really is a replacement. I truly wonder how many businesses would be “sh** out of luck” if Nadella woke up one day and decided to cut Excel.

How many businesses would not be able to function?

Consider not only the number of explicit businesses that were built off of Excel, but also the sheer amount of business intelligence functioning off of the tooling. All the dashboards. All the financial decisions. All the forecasting. So much in our business ecosystem functions upon this product; certainly every job I’ve occupied over the last 5 years.

“We have financial companies that use it to crunch vast amounts of data to run simulations so they can help determine what’s going to happen in the world. They don’t just use Excel as the tool for writing formulas. They actually build solutions on top of Excel. Things that have been running for 10-15 years.” — Terrence Huang, Partner Development Mangaer at Excel

When Hiten Shah asked Twitter “What’s an app / product you use at work that you can’t live without?”, the most upvoted comment﹣beating out new-age apps including Zoom, Slack, Notion, 1Pass, Webflow, and many more﹣was none other than grandfather Excel.

If it was a decision between keeping #Excel or, literally, every other app — would keep Excel pic.twitter.com/9IcG978pQ5

So while Excel may not stick around forever, it’s truly difficult to imagine a past, present, and future without it. And during its reign, it’s certainly changed the course of history.

The History of Excel

34 Years of Magic

As much as I love the product (have I told you that I love Excel?), I’ve also grown to love the history of MS Excel.

If we go back to the invention of Excel (34 years ago), so much has changed in the way people communicate and work. And yet, Excel at its fundamentals has not.

Before you get your panties in a knot, it’s important to note that Microsoft did not invent the concept of the spreadsheet. If not Microsoft, then who invented the spreadsheet? We have Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to thank for that.

Dan is commonly regarded as the inventor or “father of the spreadsheet”, after creating the very first spreadsheet application: VisiCalc﹣standing for visible calculator﹣in 1979, together with Bob Frankston. Dan was the first person to conceptualize the grid-like structure that continues to be the backbone of the modern spreadsheet. In fact, if you search “who created Excel?” into Google, Dan’s name shows up, despite never being employed by Microsoft.

“I imagined a magic blackboard, that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all the other numbers would automatically change […] I imagined that my calculator had mouse hardware on the bottom of it and a head-up display like in a fighter plane.”- Dan Bricklin, TEDxBeaconStreet 2016

As a technology, the invention of the spreadsheet accelerated the entire PC industry. Steve Jobs is credited as saying that VisiCalc, propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved more than any other single event.

“There have been two real explosions that have propelled the industry forward. The first one really happened in 1977 and it was the spreadsheet.” — Steve Jobs

This was truly the beginning of the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) computing, something that we now largely take for granted. Bricklin and Frankston’s contributions were furthered in 1983 by another company, Lotus Software (later a part of IBM), launching a more popular Lotus 1-2-3.

Around the same time, Microsoft had already launched its precursor to Excel called Multiplan (code name: Electronic Paper), which unfortunately struggled to compete with the Lotus 1-2-3. In fact, Jon DeVaan (member of Excel 1.0) recalls that in 1984 the spreadsheet market was virtually 100% MS-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.

Recalc or Die

Microsoft decided to invest in the development of a new product under the code name: Odyssey.

With the success of Microsoft now, it’s hard to imagine the company as an underdog or that Project Odyssey was one that defied the odds, but Excel 1.0 creators were just a small team of four: Mike Koss (team lead), Jabe Blumenthal (program manager), Doug Klunder (lead developer), and Jon DeVaan (copy protection). Other members of the early team include Steve Hazlerig, Ed Ringness, Charles Simonyi, John Hopper. To get a sense of the era when Excel was created, consider that Microsoft revealed their mouse, the Microsoft Mouse, only two years prior in 1983.

“It was a product that Microsoft built from the ground up. Started as an underdog and had unparalleled success and is now a true mission critical part of most businesses across the world.” — Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

Ironically, as Lotus 1-2-3 was beating out Microsoft on MS-DOS machines, Microsoft made the difficult decision to develop a product for the Mac, since Lotus wasn’t available on that OS and it was faster at performing the computation required. The decision wasn’t taken lightly, with Doug Klunder quitting when the decision was made.

“Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California. It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments.” — Jabe Blumenthal

“It caused a bit of a problem when I left in the middle. Rather than trying to write everything down, I presented what was essentially a three-day lecture on Excel’s design … that was videotaped for reference.” — Doug Klunder

Luckily for all of us, Doug made it back after a stint farming lettuce fields, to create what was perhaps the most critical feature of Excel 1.0. Referring to Excel as “his baby”, Klunder estimates that he originally joined Microsoft somewhere in the span of employee number 45 and 65.

“I was literally living in my office, sleeping just a few hours a night and cranking out code around the clock, and the window office got too cold at night.” — Doug Klunder

Perhaps the winning feature of Excel was its recalculating capability which Doug developed. The team’s unofficial motto was “Recalc or Die” after Klunder’s “intelligent recalc”. Instead of recalculating the entire sheet as changes were made, Klunder’s algorithms only recalculated cells impacted by the change. You can imagine that in an era where computing power was fractions of what it is today, this was a huge performance feat that pushed Microsoft ahead.

“Those early PCs couldn’t crank through numbers the way today’s powerhouse machines can, with the result that changing a number in a spreadsheet could bring things to a halt while the change rippled through all the interconnected calculations.” — Doug Klunder

The release date for Excel 1.0 was September 30, 1985 and ever since it came out, Excel truly took the lead. In the years following, it has also claimed many other “firsts” including the first to allow users to customize spreadsheet appearance, auto-fill, and the ability to intelligently copy cells.

And despite Excel seeming like the perfect name in hindsight, the code name for the project was actually Odyssey and potential product names at the time included Master Plan and Mr. Spreadsheet. Can you imagine if I was writing “An Ode to Mr. Spreadsheet?”

Keep in mind that this was a product made in the times when Microsoft still had yet to IPO and most product was still touched by Bill Gates. And I think largely why Excel emerged as the spreadsheet leader was the ethos behind Bill and the Excel team. In fact, Klunder gives credit to Gates himself for the idea behind how to implement the product-defining intelligent recalc feature, despite Gates telling him he implemented something completely different.

“Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.” — My First BillG Review

The story pares down to a team that focused on long-term objectives and built up a system that could (and would be) be a market leader for decades to come.

“When you think of the longevity of Excel, it’s amazing. We had this incredible ethos of being really efficient in how we programmed Excel, which I think is an excellent long-term fundamental.” Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

“Of course many features have been added, but the basics of the spreadsheet are the same. And I still use spreadsheets that I created 25 to 30 years ago.” — Doug Klunder

Spotting the Next Excel

In an age where «software is eating the world», we must ask ourselves: “What can we learn from this story of Excel?”

If I can convey anything to you in this piece, it’s not my love for Excel nor how much money Microsoft is making, but how spreadsheets fundamentally changed access to information. It took something that only a few people could process (data) and allowed the world to touch it, see it, and manipulate it. There was no longer just a black box.

“That was really the important thing at that time, to move software from, you know, the PhD thesis user-mode into something that an average person could use.” Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

The concept of enabling access is something we as users often take for granted, but a principle that technologists have been leveraging for decades. And just like Excel didn’t invent the spreadsheet, you don’t need to invent the concept, but instead build the access bridge. This access bridge simply needs to identify a constraint for many individuals and to remove it, ideally with technology, just as Klunder enabled high computation on slow machines with intelligent calc.

To be more concrete, here are some new age examples:

Companies like Webflow or WordPress or Squarespace make it exceptionally easy to create websites.
Ghost, which this blog is created with, makes it exceptionally easy to launch a high-quality blog in minutes.
Stripe, makes it exceptionally easy for independent merchants to sell online, just as Shopify made it exceptionally easy for any old person to start an eCommerce business.

The world already glorifies these tools, but often doesn’t sit back and reflect on the entirely new access they have given us. Without these tools, only a small subset of individuals with tailored experience could participate. Now, the whole world can.

Amidst the “no code” revolution, we can consider Excel to be an enlightening case study featuring a similar concept: creating an access bridge to something of value. So the question now becomes: “What is something currently at the fringe﹣something only a few experts have access to﹣which would fundamentally benefit the wider population? And what can be built to enable these individuals?”

It’s now our job to identify something of value that many people have assumed is inaccessible to them, and then make it accessible.

Long live Excel.

PS: Come join the conversation on Twitter.

Therapist: And what do we do when we’re feeling restless?

Me: Write a 3500-word love letter to Excel 💌

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Steph Smith

Maker http://eunoia.world , http://femake.tech , http://nomadhubb.com , http://begreat.me | Founder, Integral Labs | Prev Head of Pubs @Toptal | Dev | Nomad 🍁

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Источник

The electronic spreadsheet was essentially invented in 1979 by software pioneer Dan Bricklin, who started up Software Arts with Bob Frankston and created VisiCalc.

Contents

1 Who is the founder of Excel?
2 Did Bill Gates create Excel?
3 Who invented Excel and Word?
4 When was Microsoft Excel created?
5 Who is the real owner of Microsoft?
6 Who is the father of Microsoft Office?
7 Did Bill Gates steal Microsoft from jobs?
8 Why did Microsoft develop Excel?
9 Does Microsoft Excel have history?
10 Did Bill Gates sell Microsoft?
11 Who is the billionaire owner of Microsoft?
12 What is the salary of Microsoft owner?
13 Who is the first CEO of Microsoft?
14 Who is the owner of office?
15 Who founded MS Word?
16 Did Microsoft steal Excel?
17 Was Bill Gates jealous of Steve Jobs?
18 Did Gates steal Apple?
19 Why is Excel called Excel?
20 Who changed a cell in Excel?

Who is the founder of Excel?

Charles Simonyi
Notable work	Microsoft Office
Spouse(s)	Lisa Persdotter ( m. 2008)
Children	2
Parents	Károly Simonyi (father) Zsuzsa Simonyi (mother)

Did Bill Gates create Excel?

Who invented Excel and Word?

Charles Simonyi
Hungarian Roots: Charles Simonyi, The Inventor Of Microsoft Excel And Word And The Second Hungarian Who Traveled In The Space. Robert Velkey 2016.10. 06.

When was Microsoft Excel created?

Microsoft Excel

Who is the real owner of Microsoft?

Bill Gates founded the software company Microsoft Corporation with his friend Paul Allen. He also cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund global health and development programs.

Who is the father of Microsoft Office?

Bill Gates Sr., Father Of Microsoft Co-Founder, Dies At 94.

Did Bill Gates steal Microsoft from jobs?

But can you say he stole Steve Jobs idea? No. Bill Gates build a software operating system to sell and license it. His concept was open software.

Why did Microsoft develop Excel?

Does Microsoft Excel have history?

Did Bill Gates sell Microsoft?

Who is the billionaire owner of Microsoft?

Paul Allen
Years active	1972–2018
Known for	Co-founder of Microsoft

What is the salary of Microsoft owner?

Who is the first CEO of Microsoft?

Bill Gates developed a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 while a student at Harvard. With the success of BASIC, he and co-developer Paul Allen founded Microsoft.

Who is the owner of office?

Confirmed: Microsoft Is The New Owner Of Office.com – TechCrunch.

Who founded MS Word?

Did Microsoft steal Excel?

Was Bill Gates jealous of Steve Jobs?

Did Gates steal Apple?

Why is Excel called Excel?

Who changed a cell in Excel?

View tracked changes

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Changes that were made by a specific user	Select the Who check box and then, in the Who list, click the user whose changes you want to view.
Changes to a specific range of cells	Select the Where check box, and then type the cell reference of the sheet range.

Источник

2015: I love you
2016: I love you
2017: I love you
2018: I love you
2019: I love you

One “I love you” for every year since I’ve fallen in love with…Microsoft Excel?

A Year in Excel

To be clear, I don’t regret a minute of this. But I do want to reflect on it.

Even after decades of innovation, I want to talk about Excel.

Talk About Ubiquity

“Excel is one of the most successful products in the history of software.” — Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

Whether you like Excel or not, it’s hard to dispute that it has been a major underpinning to modern-day business.

“You’d think that there wouldn’t be any code from 15, 20, 30 years ago, but a lot of it still is.” — Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

“Microsoft Excel is the most familiar, flexible, and widely used business application in the world due to its capability to adapt to almost any business process.” — The History of Microsoft Excel

So despite hundreds of new Microsoft products having been released since Excel’s inception, CEO Satya Nadella still thinks its spreadsheet product stands out.

“Think about a world without Excel. That’s just impossible for me.” — Satya Nadella

Changing the Course of History

Albeit a bit dramatic, Microsoft Excel fundamentally changed the way people run their lives and their businesses.

“I never know how people are using Excel, because it’s used in so many different ways.” — Terrence Huang, Partner Development Mangaer at Excel

Youtube Channel: «Excel is Fun»

“Excel actually changed the way business works, really by making it easy for people to use and to be able to make decisions and do calculations and put charts on their data” — Derek Burney, Corp VP Data and BI, VP — Data and Business Intelligence

“Corporations and organizations have a lot of information or data that’s in back-end systems, and we need to be able to empower people to look at that data, twist it around, analyze it, pivot it, and examine it in different ways so that they can uncover some insight. So, Excel plays a tremendous role in the whole business intelligence world, by virtue of the fact that it’s the tool that people use. It’s the one that they actually touch.” — Derek Burney, Corp VP Data and BI, VP — Data and Business Intelligence

Most startup companies’ fiercest competitor? Personal spreadsheets already solving 90% of the problem.

— Hjalmar Gislason (@hjalli) February 2, 2018

“Spreadsheets are used for everything. From light-weight databases, to todo-lists and scheduling, data gathering, data analysis, and sophisticated business processing. These are all examples of common uses for spreadsheet software, and this is obviously by no means a comprehensive list of the things spreadsheets are used for.” — Hjalmar Gislason

Imagining a World Without Excel

“[I was] sitting next to a person on a plane and started talking and they grabbed me by the shirt, “You work on Excel? I love Excel!”” — Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

People (like me) don’t just use Excel. They love it. And as I was researching for this article, I stumbled on a simple question: “If Excel disappeared, what would you use?”

How many businesses would not be able to function?

“We have financial companies that use it to crunch vast amounts of data to run simulations so they can help determine what’s going to happen in the world. They don’t just use Excel as the tool for writing formulas. They actually build solutions on top of Excel. Things that have been running for 10-15 years.” — Terrence Huang, Partner Development Mangaer at Excel

If it was a decision between keeping #Excel or, literally, every other app — would keep Excel pic.twitter.com/9IcG978pQ5

— Jon Carroll (@jondcarroll) July 22, 2019

So while Excel may not stick around forever, it’s truly difficult to imagine a past, present, and future without it. And during its reign, it’s certainly changed the course of history.

34 Years of Magic

As much as I love the product (have I told you that I love Excel?), I’ve also grown to love the history of MS Excel.

If we go back to the invention of Excel (34 years ago), so much has changed in the way people communicate and work. And yet, Excel at its fundamentals has not.

“I imagined a magic blackboard, that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all the other numbers would automatically change […] I imagined that my calculator had mouse hardware on the bottom of it and a head-up display like in a fighter plane.”- Dan Bricklin, TEDxBeaconStreet 2016

Image Source: Dan Bricklin’s TEDX Talk

“There have been two real explosions that have propelled the industry forward. The first one really happened in 1977 and it was the spreadsheet.” — Steve Jobs

Recalc or Die

Microsoft decided to invest in the development of a new product under the code name: Odyssey.

“It was a product that Microsoft built from the ground up. Started as an underdog and had unparalleled success and is now a true mission critical part of most businesses across the world.” — Andy Lee, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

“Just imagine having this product where one of the key components of it is really only understood by this guy who will quit routinely and go be a migrant farm worker down in California. It was not necessarily the most traditional or stable of environments.” — Jabe Blumenthal

“It caused a bit of a problem when I left in the middle. Rather than trying to write everything down, I presented what was essentially a three-day lecture on Excel’s design … that was videotaped for reference.” — Doug Klunder

“I was literally living in my office, sleeping just a few hours a night and cranking out code around the clock, and the window office got too cold at night.” — Doug Klunder

“Those early PCs couldn’t crank through numbers the way today’s powerhouse machines can, with the result that changing a number in a spreadsheet could bring things to a halt while the change rippled through all the interconnected calculations.” — Doug Klunder

“Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.” — My First BillG Review

The story pares down to a team that focused on long-term objectives and built up a system that could (and would be) be a market leader for decades to come.

Microsoft Excel 1.5 for Mac (1985)

“When you think of the longevity of Excel, it’s amazing. We had this incredible ethos of being really efficient in how we programmed Excel, which I think is an excellent long-term fundamental.” Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

“Of course many features have been added, but the basics of the spreadsheet are the same. And I still use spreadsheets that I created 25 to 30 years ago.” — Doug Klunder

Spotting the Next Excel

In an age where «software is eating the world», we must ask ourselves: “What can we learn from this story of Excel?”

“That was really the important thing at that time, to move software from, you know, the PhD thesis user-mode into something that an average person could use.” Jon Devaan, Sr. VP Windows Development

To be more concrete, here are some new age examples:

Companies like Webflow or WordPress or Squarespace make it exceptionally easy to create websites.
Ghost, which this blog is created with, makes it exceptionally easy to launch a high-quality blog in minutes.
Stripe, makes it exceptionally easy for independent merchants to sell online, just as Shopify made it exceptionally easy for any old person to start an eCommerce business.

It’s now our job to identify something of value that many people have assumed is inaccessible to them, and then make it accessible.

Long live Excel.

PS: Come join the conversation on Twitter.

Therapist: And what do we do when we’re feeling restless?

Me: Write a 3500-word love letter to Excel 💌

Therapist: What?

Me:https://t.co/tGcAGUjICs

— Steph Smith (@stephsmithio) August 25, 2019

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Источник

Примечание: статья была написана в 2019 году, а в этом Microsoft Excel отмечает уже 35-летний юбилей.

Чему инструмент, выдержавший проверку временем, может научить нас в эпоху «софта, который пожирает мир»? В статье я хочу показать вам, как фундаментальные принципы, стоящие в основе Excel, можно использовать в «непотопляемых» технологиях будущего.

2015: Я люблю тебя
2016: Я люблю тебя
2017: Я люблю тебя
2018: Я люблю тебя
2019: Я люблю тебя

По одной строчке за каждый год, что я влюблен в… Microsoft Excel.

Возможно, вас это удивит, но я далеко не первый человек, который признается в чувствах к Excel. Есть даже те, кто пишет любовные послания Excel в самом Excel или явно признается в «экселезависимости». Сегодня мне хотелось бы поговорить об инструменте, который прошел проверку временем.

Год в Excel

Как это часто бывает в отношениях, мы с Excel уже были знакомы какое-то время. Но «гром грянул» только в 2015 году. Я часто шучу, что это был год электронных таблиц — настолько много времени я тогда провел за ними.

Я работал бизнес-аналитиком и проводил расчеты для списка Fortune 500. Очень хорошо помню, как в первый рабочий день кто-то сказал мне: «обрати внимание, наши опытные сотрудники не притрагиваются к мыши, работая с таблицами». Привычка использовать сочетания ctrl+[клавиша] вошла в их мышечную память. Совсем скоро я стал одним из них.

Ранее мне казалось, что способность построить график тренда по нескольким точкам — это чуть ли не вершина мастерства. И только потом я познал настоящую мощь Excel. С его помощью мы строили сложные модели для предсказания чего угодно — от цен на нефть до уровня каннибализации в сфере недвижимости. И со всей сложностью и многогранностью нашей работы справлялась одна единственная программа.

Я проработал там 11 месяцев. Думаю, примерно 1500 часов из них я провел только за таблицами. Для сравнения — всего за тот период я «наработал» чуть меньше 6000 часов — и это с учетом времени на сон, еду и всякое прочее, не связанное с Excel. Да-да, можете быть уверены, эти подсчеты я тоже произвел с помощью таблицы. Хочу, чтобы вы понимали: я не жалею ни об одной минуте и просто хочу немного порефлексировать.

Сейчас, как только какая-то технология становится неотъемлемой частью нашей жизни, мы тут же бросаемся прославлять её создателей. Новым гаджетам и SaaS-компаниям пророчат, что они изменят ход истории. А венчурные капиталисты тем временем ищут, в кого бы еще вложить свои миллионы. Посмотрите сами: Маск, Цукерберг, Пейдж и Безос стали так же известны, как звезды шоу-бизнеса.

Но мне хотелось бы рассказать вам о Дэниеле Бриклине и Даге Кландере. И о программе, которая была изобретена более 30 лет назад, но до сих пор «живет» на сотнях миллионов персональных компьютеров. Десятилетия спустя я хочу поговорить об Excel.

Разговор о вездесущем

Excel — это один из самых успешных продуктов в истории программного обеспечения. — Энди Ли, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

Любите вы Excel или нет, глупо спорить с тем, что он уже много лет является жизненно важным инструментом для многих современных компаний. Что касается глубины проникновения на рынок, Microsoft заявляет, что Excel пользуется каждый пятый совершеннолетний человек на земле. Даже несмотря на успехи своих конкурентов (например, Google Sheets), на данный момент актуально около 1,2 миллиардов лицензий на Microsoft Office. И, чтобы вы до конца поняли ситуацию: в 2016 году MS Office «заработал» 13,8 млрд долларов, а GSuite — 1,3 млрд.

Но забавнее всего — мы сейчас говорим о ПО, которое было изобретено больше 30 лет назад. И несмотря на кучу обновлений и базу из 476 функций, оригинальная концепция Excel и даже некоторые кусочки оригинального кода дожили до современных релизов — к этому мы еще вернемся.

Думаете, там не осталось кода 15-20-30-летней давности? Его там полно! — Энди Ли, Partner Software Development Engineer at Excel

Казалось бы, старичку давно пора на покой, но вместо этого он процветает! Поиск по ключевому слову «Excel» в Udemy выдает около 10000 результатов. Для сравнения, по «Javascript» находится около 7000 (примечание: сейчас цифры немного изменились, но Excel все равно выигрывает с небольшим перевесом). К тому же один из самых популярных навыков в вакансиях — требование знать Excel присутствует в каждой третьей. И если вспомнить суть электронных таблиц и относиться к ним как к самостоятельным программам, получится, что Excel — это еще и самая популярная среда разработки в мире.

Microsoft Excel — это самое привычное, гибкое и распространенное бизнес-приложение в мире. Это стало возможным благодаря его умению адаптироваться к любому бизнес-процессу. — «История Microsoft Excel».

Сумасшедшая обратная совместимость (30+ лет!), плавная кривая обучения и практически идеальная «внедряемость» сделали Excel безоговорочным лидером рынка. Многие компании не могут даже мечтать о таком превосходстве над конкурентами. А еще Excel можно пользоваться прямо из коробки: ни зависимостей, ни настройки. Он просто работает.

И несмотря на то, что со дня появления Excel Microsoft выпустила сотни других приложений, CEO Сатья Наделла считает его экстраординарным явлением:

Представьте себе мир без Excel. Лично я не могу этого сделать. — Сатья Наделла

Изменяя ход истории

Вполне можно сказать, что Microsoft Excel внес тектонические изменения как в жизни людей, так и в работу многих компаний. Лично я всё делаю в таблицах. Слежу за своей жизнью, строю списки, планирую расходы и многое другое. Прелесть электронных таблиц состоит как раз в том, что им можно найти десятки различных применений.

Я не знаю, как именно люди работают с Excel — потому что его можно использовать огромным количеством разных способов — Терренс Хуан, Partner Development Manager at Excel

YouTube-канал «Excel is Fun»

По сути, Excel решает — и всегда решал — очень важную задачу. Он просто берет то, с чем раньше могли работать только избранные — сложную аналитику и вычисления — и делает это доступным и даже увлекательным для целого мира.

Excel действительно изменил работу многих компаний, упростив процесс построения графиков, принятия решений и выполнения сложных вычислений. — Дерек Бёрни, Corp VP Data and BI, VP — Data and Business Intelligence

И хотя Excel сам по себе не «изобретал» формат электронной таблицы — об этом мы тоже поговорим чуть позже — он стал локомотивом, который сделал динамические вычисления мейнстримом. Цукерберг не изобретал социальные сети, Маск не был первым, кто предложил устраивать частные полеты в космос. Их заслуга в том, что они взяли эти идеи и раздвинули их до неизведанных границ, точно так же как Excel смог принести в большой мир концепцию электронных таблиц.

Появление MS Excel определило эпоху — он «создал тысячи стартапов и стимулировал миллионы увольнений». Благодаря этой программе появлялись совершенно новые отрасли промышленности. Только посмотрите, какое количество новых должностей появилось в мире бизнес-аналитики — даже та, на которой я проработал большую часть 2015-го. Этих профессий не существовало, пока Excel не подарил нам возможность обрабатывать и визуализировать данные — играть в «что будет, если…».

На серверах корпораций и организаций хранится много различных данных. Необходимо иметь возможность просматривать эти данные, изменять их, анализировать разными способами, чтобы в конечном итоге получить пользу. Excel играет огромную роль в мире бизнес-аналитики, потому что это программа для людей. Они её по-настоящему понимают. — Дерек Бёрни, Corp VP Data and BI, VP — Data and Business Intelligence

Целые компании выстроены на могучих плечах Excel. А там, где Excel не является жизненно необходимым компонентом, он просто важен и нужен. Но невероятнее всего то, что в 2019 году находятся компании, чьим главным «конкурентом» является Excel.

Появляется куча новых технологий. Компании зарабатывают на них миллионы, однако люди все еще тянутся к Excel. По данным Gartner от 2015 года, более половины IT-компаний «полностью» или «преимущественно» пользуются электронными таблицами для аналитики. Это доказывает, что [по крайней мере, тогда] Excel де-факто конкурирует с целой индустрией анализа данных, но при этом не ограничивает своих пользователей только одной сферой применения. Можно строить списки задач, вести учет тренировок, записывать покупки… Excel использовался своими собственными разработчиками для того, чтобы составить список гостей 30-летнего юбилея программы.

Таблицы используются для всего, от легковесных баз данных до личных расписаний. От сбора информации до её анализа. Даже для сложных бизнес-процессов. Это только основные примеры, далеко не полный список того, для чего используются электронные таблицы. — Хьялмар Гисласон

Представим себе мир без Excel

Я как-то летел на самолете и разговорился с попутчиком. Внезапно он схватил меня за футболку: «Так ты работаешь в Excel? Я без ума от Excel! — Джон ДеВаан, [ex] Sr. VP Windows Development

Люди вроде меня не просто работают в Excel. Они его действительн любят. Когда я собирал материалы для этой статьи, мне не давал покоя один вопрос: а чем бы мы пользовались, если бы Excel взял и исчез?

Конечно, базовым его функциям можно найти замену. Но что делать с его эксклюзивными возможностями, альтернатив которым запросто может не найтись? Мне правда интересно, сколько компаний по всему миру будут вынуждены сделать паузу, если одним прекрасным утром Наделла проснется и решит «зарезать» Excel. Сколько компаний не смогут нормально работать?

Существуют финансовые компании, которые используют Excel для обработки огромных объемов данных. Они проводят в нем симуляции, чтобы предсказать события в мире. Они не просто используют Excel в качестве инструмента для написания формул. Они фактически строят собственные решения поверх Excel. И многие из этих надстроек работают уже 10-15 лет. — Терренс Хуан, Partner Development Manager at Excel

Когда Хайтен Ша спросил у пользователей Twitter, без какого приложения или продукта они не смогут жить, старина Excel на голову опередил по количеству лайков стильный «молодняк» вроде Zoom, Slack, Notion, 1Pass и Webflow.

История Excel

34 года волшебства

История Excel мне нравится ничуть не меньше, чем сам продукт. Если вернуться на 34 года назад, окажется, что весь мир с тех пор сильно изменился. Но только не фундаментальные принципы этой программы.

Прежде чем вы начнете кидать в меня тапками, я хочу сказать: компания Microsoft НЕ изобретала электронные таблицы. А кто же тогда это сделал? Скажем за них спасибо Дэну Бриклину и Бобу Фрэнкстону.

Дэна часто называют «отцом электронных таблиц». Именно он вместе с Бобом Фрэнкстоном в 1979 году разработал первое подобное приложение: VisiCalc — Visible Calculator. Дэн первым привнес концепцию таблицы-сетки, которая до сих пор в неизменном виде присутствует во всех подобных приложениях. Если же забить в Google «Кто сделал Excel?», вы увидите имя Дэна, хотя он ни дня не работал на Microsoft.

Я представлял себе волшебную школьную доску, на которой, если стереть одно число и вписать другое, все пересчитается само собой. — Дэн Бриклин, TEDxBeaconStreet 2016

Изобретение электронных таблиц дало толчок всей индустрии персональных компьютеров. Стив Джобс однажды говорил, что именно VisiCalc’у Apple II обязан своим успехом.

На самом деле, было два «реальных взрыва», которые толкнули вперед всю индустрию. Первый произошел в 1977, и это были электронные таблицы — Стив Джобс

Это стало началом WYSIWYG, хотя мы давно привыкли принимать это как должное. Работа Бриклина и Фрэнкстона была замечена другой компанией, Lotus Software, которая в дальнейшем была куплена IBM. Новый продукт, основанный на идее VisiCalc, получил название Lotus 1-2-3 и вышел на рынок в 1983-м.

В то же самое время Microsoft уже разрабатывали предшественника Excel, программу Multiplan (под кодовым названием Electronic Paper). Ей пришлось как следует побороться с Lotus 1-2-3 за место на рынке. Джон ДеВаан, один из разработчиков Excel 1.0, вспоминал, что в 1984 году рынок электронных таблиц был на 100% занят Lotus 1-2-3, работавшим под MS-DOS.

Пересчитывай или умри

Microsoft решила вложиться в разработку нового продукта под кодовым именем Odyssey. Зная современное положение Microsoft, сложно представить себе её в роли аутсайдера, чей проект имел все шансы на провал. Команда, разрабатывавшая Excel, состояла всего из четырех человек: Майк Косс, Джейб Блюменталь, Даг Кландер и Джон ДеВаан. Также в команду входили Стив Хазлериг, Эд Рингнесс, Чарльз Симони и Джон Хоппер. Чтобы еще лучше понять дух той эпохи, подумайте вот о чем: с момента создания Microsoft Mouse прошло всего два года.

Поскольку (какая ирония!) Lotus 1-2-3 переиграл Microsoft на их же собственном поле — MS-DOS, скрепя сердце, Microsoft решила разрабатывать продукт для Mac. Там Lotus’а еще не было, а сама платформа обладала необходимыми мощностями. Решение было не из легких. Когда оно было окончательно принято, из команды ушел Даг Кландер.

Представьте себе: единственный человек, который имеет полное представление об одном из компонентов продукта, просто уходит. Ради того, чтобы работать на ферме […]. — Джейб Блюменталь

Когда я ушел посреди разработки, возникли некоторые проблемы. Вместо того, чтобы записать всё на бумаге, я провел трехдневную презентацию по архитектуре Excel… на всякий случай даже сделали видеозапись. — Даг Кландер

К счастью для нас всех, вскоре Даг одумался и вернулся со скудных салатных полей обратно в офис, чтобы создать один из самых важных компонентов Excel 1.0. Даг часто говорит Excel как о «своем дитя». По его подсчетам, он устроился в Microsoft где-то в промежутке между 45-м и 65-м сотрудником.

Я буквально жил в офисе, спал пару часов и сразу же возвращался за код. Помню, как сильно по ночам дуло из окна в офисе — Даг Кландер

Возможно, одной из самых важных вещей в Excel 1.0 была возможность автоматического пересчета значений. Именно её и разработал Кландер. Неофициальным девизом команды после того, как Кландер внедрил свой «умный пересчет» стала фраза «пересчитывай или умри». Вместо того, чтобы после каждого изменения заново считать весь лист, алгоритм Кландера затрагивал только нужные ячейки. В те времена это круто увеличило производительность, и продукт Microsoft на голову опередил конкурентов.

Первые компьютеры не могли считать так же быстро, как современные машины. Изменение значения в одной ячейке могло «повесить» компьютер из-за необходимости провести кучу связанных с этим расчетов. — Даг Кландер

Excel 1.0 вышел 30 сентября 1985 года и с первого дня стал лидером рынка. В последующие годы Excel привнес в мир электронных таблиц еще много прорывных нововведений: возможность настраивать внешний вид таблицы, автозамену и интеллектуальное копирование ячеек.

Несмотря на то, что название Excel сейчас кажется нам идеальным, были и другие варианты: например, Master Plan и Mr. Spreadsheet. Можете себе представить оду Мистеру Табличкину?

Не забывайте: это были времена, когда Microsoft еще не вышла на IPO, и ко многим продуктам лично прикладывал руку Билл Гейтс. Я думаю, что Excel стал лидером во многом благодаря командному духу и идеалам, которых придерживались Билл и разработчики Excel. Например, Кландер говорит, что идею «умного пересчета» ему подал сам Билл. Гейтс возражает и утверждает, что Кландер сделал вовсе не то, что он имел в виду.

Билл Гейтс был великолепным технарем. Он понимал Variants и COM-объекты, и IDispatch, и чем Automation отличается от vtables, и почему это могло привести к двойному интерфейсу. Он беспокоился о функциях для работы с датами. Он не вмешивался в разработку, если доверял тем, кто пишет программу. Но провести его не было никакой возможности: он был программист. Настоящий, реальный программист. — My First BillG Review

Получилась история о команде, которая сделала долгосрочную ставку и разработала целую систему, которая есть и будет лидером рынка еще много десятилетий.

Microsoft Excel 1.5 для Mac (1985)

Когда задумываешься о «долгожительстве» Excel, дух захватывает. У нас было ощущение, что мы делаем нечто очень нужное и полезное. Вероятно, поэтому Excel до сих пор живет и развивается. — Джон ДеВаан, [ex] Sr. VP Windows Development

Конечно, много функций с тех пор добавилось. Но основа, сам принцип электронной таблицы, остался неизменным. И я все еще пользуюсь таблицами, которые я сделал 25-30 лет назад. — Даг Кландер

Кто на новенького?

В эпоху, когда «софт пожирает мир», мы должны спросить у себя: чему может научить нас история Excel? Я не могу выразить этой статьей ни силу своей любви к Excel, ни сколько денег Microsoft на нем зарабатывает. Но я смог показать, как сильно электронные таблицы влияют на доступ к информации.

На тот момент это действительно было очень важно: делать программы, понятные обычным пользователям, а не «докторские диссертации с пользовательским интерфейсом». — Джон ДеВаан, [ex] Sr. VP Windows Development

Концепция простого доступа [к чему либо, в т.ч., к информации] часто воспринимается пользователями как нечто обыкновенное. На самом деле ученые и программисты взращивали её десятилетиями. Да, Excel не был первопроходцем электронных таблиц. Но не нужно быть пионером, чтобы построить для всех «мостик доступности», который снимет с пользователей ограничения. В идеале — техническим путем, как Кландер, «научивший» даже маломощные компьютеры производить сложные вычисления.

Чтобы вы лучше понимали меня, приведу несколько современных примеров.

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Эти инструменты уже получили свою порцию славы в современном мире благодаря новым возможностям, которые они открывают. Без них только небольшая горстка избранных могла бы выйти на этот рынок. Теперь он доступен всему миру.

В разгар революции под девизом «без кода» Excel можно рассматривать в качестве отличного примера с похожей концепцией: построить «мост доступности» к чему-то ценному. Закономерно возникают вопросы. А что прямо сейчас находится в области, доступной только нескольким экспертам? Что может принести пользу более широкой аудитории? И что можно создать для этих людей? Это наша работа — увидеть что-то ценное, но недоступное для большинства людей, и сделать его доступным. Живи долго и процветай, Excel!

Примечание: к оригинальной статье есть комментарий от читателя с несколько иной точкой зрения, и мы не могли его проигнорировать.

Билл Джелен: Спасибо за публикацию отличной статьи, но Excel не «победил» 30 сентября 1985. Он был процентов на 400 медленнее Lotus 1-2-3, и всё это вылилось в тяжелую борьбу (у обоих продуктов были крутые новые «фичи»), продолжавшуюся до 1995 года.

Источник

Смена одних компьютерных программ другими — дело вполне привычное и естественное. Впрочем, в каждом правиле есть исключение, и одно из них — программа для управления электронными таблицами Excel. Она была создана компанией Microsoft в 1985 году и с тех пор не теряет популярности. Экономисты пользуются ей в течение 36 лет — да что там, о ней знает практически каждый, кто работал в финансовой сфере или предоставлял консалтинговые услуги. Её используют практически все компании, обеспечивающие деятельность других бизнес-структур. В этом нет ничего удивительно, поскольку составление сложных финансовых моделей через Excel стало общедоступным.

Excel стал первой программой для программирования без кода ещё до того, как родилось это понятие. Его пользователи, по сути, являются непрофессиональными разработчиками, даже не задумываясь об этом. В Excel настолько много возможностей, что стартапы вполне могут создавать новые узкоспециализированные инструменты на базе лишь каких-то из них.

При этом на волне популярности электронных таблиц от Microsoft другие крупные разработчики стали им подражать, что в конечном итоге сформировало у пользователей устойчивые привычки и стереотипы, которые также способствуют его дальнейшей жизни. Да, именно Excel и посвящена эта статья.

Табличные войны: краткая история становления Microsoft Excel

Excel родился в результате конкуренции и был не первым продуктом такого типа. Студенту Дэну Бриклину (Dan Bricklin) понадобилась таблица для тематического исследования. Тогда выбор был невелик — составлять её вручную на листе бумаги или на стационарном компьютере учебного заведения. Оба варианта не были особенно привлекательными, и это натолкнуло молодого человека на мысль создать более удобный инструмент. В 1978 году он презентовал VisiCalc («видимый калькулятор») — первую в мире электронную таблицу. Инновационный продукт оказался востребованным и быстро завоевал популярность.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

Двумя годами позже у него появился конкурент — SuperCalc. Тем не менее, VisiCalc устоял, потому что в его продвижении начал участвовать талантливый программист Митч Капор (Mitch Kapor). В 1982-м он стал самостоятельным, основал компанию Lotus и создал свой собственный вариант электронных таблиц под названием «1-2-3». Его продажи быстро стали приносить прибыль в десятки, а потом и сотни миллионов долларов. В том же году компания Microsoft с Биллом Гейтсом во главе выпустила свою первую программу для работы с электронными таблицами Multiplan. Впрочем, конкуренции с детищем Капора она не выдержала.

После поражения команда Гейтса принялась за новый проект по имени Odyssey. Участвовавший в его разработке Дуг Клундер (Doug Klunder) придумал, как выполнять алгоритм вычислений сразу в двух измерениях, что позволило добиться более высокого быстродействия, чем у конкурентов. Этот принцип лёг в основу таблиц Excel, которые мир впервые увидел в 1985 году. Приложение получило несколько отличительных черт. Одна из них — удобная обработка входных данных с моментальным результатом на выходе. Понятное управление позволяет работать с продуктом широкому кругу пользователей.

Ещё одним фактором успеха Excel стало решения Билла наладить сотрудничество со своим конкурентом Стивом Джобсом и выпускать новую разработку исключительно на его компьютерах Macintosh. Благодаря этому она обрела первоначальную известность и стала самой востребованной для работы с таблицами на Мас.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

Сейчас Excel заняла практически монопольное положение среди программ, используемых в сфере финансового моделирования, и популярна во многих других отраслях и в рамках Windows — первой операционной системы Microsoft. Всё могло сложиться абсолютно иначе, но карты в отношении Excel легли именно так.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

Microsoft Excel можно даже назвать языком программирования

Сейчас трудно подсчитать, сколько именно человек используют Excel, но, по некоторым оценкам, это порядка 750 миллионов человек. Многие из них не являются разработчиками и даже мысленно себя к ним не относят, хотя, по сути, программируют. Размещая формулы в ячейках, они фактически пользуются функциональным языком. Функциональность заключается в том, что при вводе новых входных данных получаются абсолютно точные выходные в независимости от того, что происходит в других разделах. Кроме того, полученные результаты можно использовать как вводные для других функций.

Благодаря возможности связей между функциями программа обрела мощность и гибкость. Да, её нельзя использовать для решения абсолютно любых задач. В то же время обычный пользователь может получить блестящие результаты во многих сферах, не задумываясь о пошаговых вычислениях и других мелочах, поскольку это за него уже сделали разработчики. Например, можно рассчитать внутреннюю норму доходности на инвестиции, не зная конкретной формулы. С каждым обновлением механизм работы таблиц становится быстрее и проще, но простота не означает отсутствие самого факта программирования со стороны обывателя.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

Более того, тех, кто используют Excel, можно причислить к программистам полного стека, то есть к тем, кто выполняет всю работу сам. Это вполне объяснимо, поскольку нередко только один сотрудник в компании обладает полным объёмом информации для построения конкретной финансовой модели — у других свои задачи.

Кроме того, можно создавать базы данных, списки дел, счета-фактуры, управлять проектами, эффективно вести бухгалтерский учёт, отслеживать ошибки, выстраивать стратегии взаимоотношений с клиентами и многое другое. Да, Microsoft Excel — это действительно нечто во многих отношениях.

Многие не видят будущего без существования Microsoft Excel

Программе пророчат долгое будущее, и дело не только в её функциональности. В данном случае важно также учитывать особенности человеческой психики и формирование ментальной модели. То есть многим пользователям удобно работать с тем, что уже есть под рукой, даже если появляются более удобные инструменты. В таких вопросах наблюдается инерция мышления — людям свойственно отдавать предпочтение тому, что они хорошо знают. Если поставить на полку «Никомахову этику» Аристотеля, а рядом расположить философские размышления современников, большинство выберут признанного классика.

Так продолжается из поколения в поколение. Если вернуться к аналогии с философскими трудами, все больше новых авторов пишут свои произведения на основе давно признанных, надеясь, что их творения проживут так же долго, но Аристотель в итоге не придаётся забвению. Так же и с Microsoft Excel.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

Не стоит сбрасывать со счетов и так называемый эффект Линди. Согласно данной теории, если какая-то разработка или технология существует достаточно долго, то она может просуществовать как минимум ещё столько же. В данном случае речь идёт про ещё 36 лет жизни Excel, и с каждым годом этот срок будет пропорционально увеличиваться. Продукт продолжает создавать сетевой эффект: одни пишут под него плагины, другие берут его за основу в своих разработках. Да, именно так и создаются традиции. Microsoft Excel остаётся одной из них, и предпосылок для изменения данного факта попросту нет.

Microsoft Excel — не всесильный инструмент, но это временно

Microsoft Excel используется для построения финансовых моделей и других подобных вычислений. Приложение хорошо зарекомендовало себя в бизнес-кругах и задействовано, большей частью, именно там. Но, несмотря на то, что возможности для маневров и создания сложных структур у пользователей довольно велики, до полноценного языка программирования продукт, конечно же, не дотягивает. Он не может решить абсолютно все задачи, как это делают наиболее популярные сейчас языки Python и Javascript. Тем не менее, в скором времени программа может сравняться по возможностям даже с ними.

Excel formulas, the world’s most popular programming language, is now Turing-complete. Go check it out! https://t.co/qkw3Bmt1gp— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) February 9, 2021

Генеральный директор Microsoft, Сатья Наделла (Satya Nadella), недавно недвусмысленно намекнул именно на это. Он сообщил, что Excel теперь полный по Тьюрингу — то есть ограничений впредь не будет. Повышение функциональности приложения и его гибкости могут стать возможными благодаря использованию платформы бессерверных вычислений LAMBDA. Не исключено, что в будущем пользователи начнут всё активней задействовать новые возможности и реализовывать ранее недоступные задачи. Если у Microsoft получится сделать все это ещё и достаточно простым, ценность Excel заметно вырастет.

Как Microsoft Excel повлиял на современную ИТ-индустрию

Продукт, просуществовавший 36 лет, не мог не оказать влияние на индустрию создания программ для управления электронными таблицами и стал вдохновителем для многих разработчиков. Периодически конкуренты выпускают нечто подобное, стараясь отбить у лидера часть рынка. Наиболее яркий пример — «Google Таблицы», однако пальму первенства у Microsoft не удалось отобрать даже поисковому гиганту. Из-за своей гибкости Excel остаётся фаворитом для большинства финансистов. Предприниматели продолжают с его помощью выстраивать и оптимизировать сложные рабочие процессы

Тем не менее, имеющиеся в Microsoft Excel ограничения привели к тому, что некоторые предприимчивые программисты начали разделять функции программы на отдельные элементы. Проще говоря, они наблюдали за тем, как применяют функционал приложения пользователи, подмечали, чего не хватает, и думали, как это можно реализовать в узконаправленном софте. Так и стали появляться специализированные инструменты, направленные на решение определённых задач. Они не обладали гибкостью и функциональностью вдохновителя, но для конкретной цели подходили куда лучше.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

В результате появилась целая отрасль, черпающая идеи из популярного продукта Microsoft. На этом смогли заработать сотни стартапов, разработавших программное обеспечение для корпоративной среды. Тенденция сохраняется и сейчас, специализированные компании фактически выслеживают своих потенциальных клиентов в таблицах Excel, обращая внимание на возникающие у них затруднения. В этой индустрии вращается порядка полутриллиона долларов, поэтому многие хотят получить свой кусок от этого практически безразмерного пирога. В дальнейшем желающих будет становиться только больше.

Подводя итоги: про Microsoft Excel вряд ли все скоро забудут

Вдохновитель целой индустрии продолжает держаться на плаву, несмотря на все потуги распилить его и утопить. Microsoft отвечает молодым компаниям, пытающимся превзойти её зрелое детище, новыми обновлениями, в которых учитываются прежние недостатки. По мнению некоторых аналитиков, именно то, что многие пытаются разделить Excel на обособленные функции, помогает его выживанию. Разработчики видят, что можно улучшить и отсекают то, что мешает. С каждым годом растёт функционал и повышается гибкость.

Excel — величайшая компьютерная программа. Она никогда не умрёт, и вот почему

Программа позволяет своим пользователям творить самостоятельно и почти без ограничений, а они, в свою очередь, платят ей симпатией и способствуют формированию положительного мнения у сообщества. Появляются очередные подражатели, рождаются все новые волны сетевых эффектов, круг замыкается, и Excel продолжает жить. Кроме того, не стоит забывать, что настолько укрепившийся на рынке разработчик как Microsoft не дремлет и попросту не допустит появления действительно опасного нового конкурента.

Статья написана на основе материала Not Boring.

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Источник

How long have you been using Microsoft Excel?

Have you ever thought how Excel or the other electronic spreadsheet softwares came to existence?

In today’s post, we will go back in time to trace the origin of Excel. So, here we go:

While the origin of electronic spreadsheets can be traced back to 1978, but it wasn’t until 1982 when Microsoft jumped into the arena of Electronic spreadsheets with a product known as MultiPlan.

Muliplan was Microsoft’s first electronic spreadsheet program. It was introduced in 1982 as a competitor for VisiCalc (the first ever electronic spreadsheet program). The key difference between Multiplan and its competitors was Microsoft’s decision to use R1C1 addressing instead of the A1 addressing which was introduced by VisiCalc.

Muliplan was very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost fame to Lotus 1-2-3. This thing motivated Microsoft to develop another spreadsheet product Excel.The first version of Excel was released in 1985 for Mac. Later in November 1987, the first Windows version was released.

It all started with VisiCalc:

In 1978, Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin developed a program called VisiCalc. It was a relatively small program with few basic capabilities. It could only calculate data within a matrix of 5 columns by 20 rows.
To make VisiCalc more powerful Bricklin hired Bob Frankston, who is also known as the co-creator of VisiCalc. Frankston made the program fast and with better arithmetic. VisiCalc was an instant success and the duo were able to sell around 1 million copies of the program.

Note: You can still get an original copy of Visicalc from Dan Bricklin’s website: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm [size: 27 K]

What followed VisiCalc?

After the phenomenal success of VisiCalc, a team headed by Mitch Kapor in 1983, developed a new spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3. Mitch and his team power packed Lotus 1-2-3 with charting, graphing and rudimentary database capabilities along with the basic arithmetic. This made Lotus 1-2-3 a new favourite in the industry.

Although, before this in 1982 Microsoft had already launched Muliplan but it was outshined by Lotus 1-2-3. And this thing provoked Microsoft to come up with Microsoft Excel and rest is history.

The Infographic on History of Microsoft Excel:

This infographic takes a closer look at the history of Excel, circa 1978-2013.

Источник

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It features calculation and computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel is a part of the Microsoft Office productivity suite.

History

Early 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. 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 Macintosh version 2.2) on November 19, 1987. Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by the early 1990s, 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.

Microsoft Excel 2.1 included a runtime version of Windows 2.1

Early 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. 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, 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 still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is .xls.
Excel 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.

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 (previous spreadsheet programs 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 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 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 techniques.

The automation functionality provided by VBA has caused Excel to become a target for macro viruses. This was a serious problem in the corporate world 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, although since version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented features from their products.

Versions

‘Excel 97’ (8.0) being run on Windows XP

Microsoft Excel 2003 running under Windows XP Home Edition

Excel 2003 icon

Versions for Microsoft Windows include:

1987 Excel 2 for Windows*
1990 Excel 3
1992 Excel 4 included in Microsoft Office 3.0
1993 Excel 5 (Office 4.2 & 4.3, also a 32-bit version for Windows NT only on the PowerPC, DEC Alpha, and MIPS)
1995 Excel for Windows 95 (version 7) included in Microsoft Office 95*
1997 Excel 97 (version included in Microsoft Office 97 (x86 and also a DEC Alpha version)
1999 Excel 2000 (version 9) included in Microsoft Office 2000
2001 Excel 2002 (version 10) included in Microsoft Office XP
2003 Excel 2003 (version 11) included in Microsoft Office 2003
2007 Excel 2007 (version 12) included in Microsoft Office 2007
2010 Excel 2010 (version 14) included in Microsoft Office 2010
2012 Excel 2013 (version 15) included in Microsoft Office 2013
2015 Excel 2016 (version 16) included in Microsoft Office 2016
2018 Excel 2019 (version 16) included in Microsoft Office 2019
2021 Excel 2021 (version 16) included in Microsoft Office 2021

Note: There is no Excel 1.0, in order to avoid confusion with Apple versions.

Note: There is no Excel 6.0, because the Windows 95 version was launched with Word 7. All the Office 95 & Office 4.X products have OLE 2 capacity — moving data automatically from various programs — and Excel 7 should show that it was contemporary with Word 7.

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 (part of Microsoft Office 3.0 for Macintosh)
1994 Excel 5.0 (part of Microsoft Office 4.2 for Macintosh, first PowerPC version)
1998 Excel 8.0 (part of Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition)
2000 Excel 9.0 (part of Microsoft Office 2001)
2001 Excel 10.0 (part of Microsoft Office v. X)
2004 Excel 11.0 (part of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac)
2008 Excel 12.0 (part of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac)
2010 Excel 14.0 (part of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011)
2015 Excel 15.0 (part of Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac)
2018 Excel 2019 (part of Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac)
2021 Excel 2021 (part of Microsoft Office 2021 for Mac)

Versions for OS/2 include:

1989 Excel 2.2
1990 Excel 2.3
1991 Excel 3.0

File formats

Microsoft Excel up until 2007 version used a proprietary binary file format called Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) as its primary format. Excel 2007 uses Office Open XML as its primary file format, an XML-based container similar in design to XML-based format called «XML Spreadsheet» («XMLSS»), first introduced in Excel 2002. The latter format is not able to encode VBA macros.

Although supporting and encouraging the use of new XML-based formats as replacements, Excel 2007 is still backwards compatible with the traditional, binary, formats. In addition, most versions of Microsoft Excel are able to read CSV, DBF, SYLK, DIF, and other legacy formats.

Microsoft Excel 2007 Office Open XML formats

Microsoft Excel 2007, along with the other products in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, introduces a host of new file formats. These are part of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification.

The new Excel 2007 formats are:

Excel Workbook (.xlsx): The default Excel 2007 workbook format. In reality a ZIP compressed archive with a directory structure of XML text documents. Functions as the primary replacement for the former binary .xls format, although it does not support Excel macros for security reasons.
Excel Macro-enabled Workbook (.xlsm): As Excel Workbook, but with macro support.
Excel Binary Workbook (.xlsb): As Excel Macro-enabled Workbook, but storing information in binary form rather than XML documents for opening and saving documents more quickly and efficiently. Intended especially for very large documents with tens of thousands of rows, and/or several hundreds of columns.
Excel Macro-enabled Template (.xltm): A template document that forms a basis for actual workbooks, with macro support. The replacement for the old .xlt format.
Excel Add-in (.xlam): Excel add-in to add extra functionality and tools. Inherent macro support due to the file purpose.

Exporting and Migration of spreadsheets

APIs are also provided to open excel spreadsheets in a variety of other applications and environments other than Microsoft Excel. These include opening excel documents on the web using either ActiveX controls,or plugins like the Adobe Flash Player. Attempts have also been made to be able to copy excel spreadsheets to web applications using comma-separated values].

Criticism

Due to Excel’s foundation on floating point calculations, the statistical accuracy of Excel has been criticized, as has the lack of certain statistical tools. Excel proponents have responded that some of these errors represent edge cases and that the relatively few users who would be affected by these know of them and have workarounds and alternatives.

Excel incorrectly assumes that 1900 is a leap year. The bug originated from Lotus 1-2-3, and was implemented in Excel for the purpose of backward compatibility. This legacy has later been carried over into Office Open XML file format. Excel also supports the second date format based on year 1904 epoch.

Criticisms of spreadsheets in general also apply significantly to Excel. See Spreadsheet shortcomings.

Errors in Excel 2007

Screen shot of Microsoft Excel 2007 showing the 65,535 display error

On September 22, 2007 it was reported that Excel 2007 will show incorrect results in certain situations. Specifically, for some pairs of numbers with a product of 65,535 (such as 850 and 77.1), Excel will report their product as 100,000. This occurs with about 14.5% of such pairs. In addition, if one is added to this result, Excel will give 100,001. However, if one is subtracted from the original product, the correct result of 65,534 is reported. (Also if it is multiplied or divided by 2, the correct answers 131,070 and 32,767.5 are reported, respectively.)

Microsoft has reported on the Microsoft Excel Blog that the problem exists in the display of six specific floating point values between 65534.99999999995 and 65,535, and six values between 65535.99999999995 and 65,536 (not including the integers). Any calculation that results in one of these twelve values will be displayed incorrectly. The actual value stored and passed to other cells is correct, only the displayed value is wrong. However, some instances, such as rounding the value to zero decimal places, will result in an incorrect value in memory. The error was introduced with changes made to the Excel calculation logic for the 2007 version, and does not exist in previous versions. On October 9, 2007, Microsoft released a fix to the public.
Chris Lomont presented a detailed explanation of the bug, how it was likely caused by changing 16-bit formatting code to 32-bit code, why it only affects 12 values and then only while formatting, and how the hotfix corrects the bug.

References

↑ Buy Microsoft Excel, Microsoft. Accessed 2022-01-12.

External links

Microsoft Excel at Microsoft 365
Excel Files Generation with .net framework
A variety of links offering mainly free Excel Help by Microsoft recognized Most Valued Professionals
Microsoft Excel at Wikipedia

	Wikipedia This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).

Источник

Features

Basic operation

Functions

Macro programming

VBA programming

History

Charts

Add-ins

Data storage and communication

Number of rows and columns

File formats

Binary

XML Spreadsheet

Current file extensions

Old file extensions

Using other Windows applications

Using external data

Export and migration of spreadsheets

Password protection

Other platforms

Excel for mobile

Excel for the web

Microsoft Excel Viewer

Quirks

Numeric precision

Statistical functions

Excel MOD function error

Fictional leap day in the year 1900

Date range

Conversion problems

Errors with large strings

Filenames

Versions

Early history

Microsoft Windows

Excel 2.0 (1987)

Excel 3.0 (1990)

Excel 4.0 (1992)

Excel 5.0 (1993)

Excel 95 (v7.0)

Excel 97 (v8.0)

Excel 2000 (v9.0)

Excel 2002 (v10.0)

Excel 2003 (v11.0)

Excel 2007 (v12.0)

Excel 2010 (v14.0)

Excel 2013 (v15.0)

Excel 2016 (v16.0)

Excel 2019, Excel 2021, Office 365 and subsequent (v16.0)

Apple Macintosh

OS/2

Summary

Impact

Security

Games

See also

References

References

External links

Excel works!

Excel works!

Кто создал Excel?

Кто создал Excel?

Что же делают эти гениальные люди — кто создал Excel сейчас?

Who Created Microsoft Excel?

Who is the founder of Excel?

Did Bill Gates create Excel?

Who invented Excel and Word?

When was Microsoft Excel created?

Who is the real owner of Microsoft?

Who is the father of Microsoft Office?

Did Bill Gates steal Microsoft from jobs?

Why did Microsoft develop Excel?

Does Microsoft Excel have history?

Did Bill Gates sell Microsoft?

Who is the billionaire owner of Microsoft?

What is the salary of Microsoft owner?

Who is the first CEO of Microsoft?

Who is the owner of office?

Who founded MS Word?