We explain what Excel is and what is the history of this famous application software. Also, what are its utilities.
What is Excel?
Microsoft Excel, MS Excel or simply Excel is a app software published by the company Microsoft, which provides digital support to accounting, financial, organizational and programming tasks, through spreadsheets. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite, which contains various office programs such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, etc.
Excel is possibly the most popular program in its area in the world, published in different versions and updates since its very first appearance in 1985.
Among its range of capabilities is the management of tables, formats and mathematical formulas, as well as pre-programmed functions, and their corresponding conversion to graphics of various kinds.
His name was subject to controversy when another business, who already owned software called Excel, won a lawsuit against Microsoft forcing them to use his name as part of the application, thus giving birth to MS Excel, often named using the letters XL, for its English sound. In time, however, Microsoft would buy the brand from its rival company and conquer all forms of product naming.
This program is owned by Microsoft under a commercial use license and operates under the operating environments of Windows, Macintosh and some others, in various languages. However, there are parallel versions such as the open source package OpenExcel or LibreExcel, belonging to OpenOffice or LibreOffice respectively.
History of Microsoft Excel
The direct predecessor of Excel was a Program handling of spreadsheets Published by Microsoft in 1982, under the name Multiplan, which was extremely popular on certain systems, but not enough to beat Lotus 1-2-3 from Lotus Development, a competing company bought by IBM in 1996.
In 1985 the first version of Excel appeared for Mac, 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 such a virtual environment. Thus, Excel gradually became the spreadsheet program par excellence for the PC, surpassing even the popular Quattro Pro from Borland.
Since then, Excel has offered its public an updated version every two years or so until it reaches the current versions, which are v16.0 (Excel 2107). In the case of Operating system OS / 2, the current version is 3.0, from 1991.
What is Microsoft Excel for?
As has been said, Excel is a system of spreadsheets, that is, of management spreadsheets. information in an orderly and systematic way, 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, especially useful for creating tables, graphs and other information representation operations, starting from a virtually infinite matrix of rows and columns in which the data can be entered and customized. data. In addition, Excel has a system of macros or automated formulas, which also allow its use for the purposes ofalgorithms Yprogramming.