We explain what Excel is and what the history of this famous application software is. Also, what are its uses.
What is Excel?
Microsoft Excel, MS Excel or simply Excel is an application software published by the company Microsoft which provides digital support for accounting, financial, organizational and programming tasks, through spreadsheets. It is part of the Microsoft Office package, which contains various office programs such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, etc.
Excel is possibly the most popular program in its area in the entire world, published in different versions and updates since its first appearance in 1985.
Among its capabilities offering is the management of tables, formats and mathematical formulas as well as pre-programmed functions, and their corresponding conversion to graphics of various nature.
His name was subject to controversy when another company, which already owned software called Excel, won a lawsuit against Microsoft forcing them to use its name as part of the application, thus creating MS Excel. often named by use of the letters XL, for their English sound. Over time, however, Microsoft would buy the brand from its rival company and conquer all forms of product naming.
This program belongs to Microsoft under a commercial use license and works under Windows, Macintosh and some other operating environments, in various languages. However, there are parallel versions such as the open source package OpenExcel or LibreExcel, belonging to OpenOffice or LibreOffice respectively.
See also: Office automation
History of Microsoft Excel
The direct predecessor of Excel was a spreadsheet management program published by Microsoft in 1982, called Multiplan, which was extremely popular on certain systems, but not enough to surpass Lotus 1-2-3 from Lotus Development, a Competing company bought by IBM in 1996.
In 1985 the first version of Excel for Mac appeared and the first for Windows in 1987, giving the application the advantage over Lotus 1-2-3, which took a long time to migrate to said virtual environment. Thus, Excel gradually became the spreadsheet program par excellence for PC, even surpassing the popular Quattro Pro from the Borland company.
Since then, Excel has offered its public an updated version every two years more or less, until reaching the current versions, which are v16.0 (Excel 2107). In the case of the OS/2 Operating System, the current version is 3.0, from 1991.
What is Microsoft Excel for?
As has been said, Excel is a spreadsheet system, that is, information management sheets in an orderly and systematic manner, allowing the automation of logical operations (arithmetic, geometric, etc.) and making life easier for accountants, financiers, information managers and even those who work with lists.
It is a versatile application, useful especially for creating tables, graphs and other operations representation of information, based on a virtually infinite matrix of rows and columns in which data can be entered and customized. In addition, Excel has a system of macros or automated formulas, which also allow its use for algorithms and programming purposes.
