When was excel developed

During my 11 months in that job, I estimate that I spent over hours in Excel. For perspective, there are less than 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. 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.

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. And despite the numerous updates and creation of now functions , the concepts behind Excel and even some of the original code still remain. More on this later. 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.

Perhaps most principally, people can trust that they can use the program completely out of the box. No dependencies, no boilerplate; it just works.

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. 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.

Microsoft Excel has had many versions throughout its history. The different releases with their release dates are listed below. Microsoft Excel was not the first spreadsheet program. Lotus and VisiCalc were popular spreadsheet programs released before Excel. Home Dictionary E - Definitions. Excel overview. Where do you find or start Excel? How to open Microsoft Excel without using a mouse. How can Excel be formatted? Download an example of a spreadsheet file.

Why do people use Excel? Why would someone use Excel over another spreadsheet program? Excel file extensions. What are the different versions of Microsoft Excel?

What came before Excel? Related pages. Microsoft Excel help and support. Tip If there is no root folder, look for and open the folder with Office in the folder name. Tip Even with all Excel's options, a free spreadsheet program like Google Sheets is often all most users need. Note If you want to get Excel because it's a job requirement, it's still okay to learn all the basics in a free spreadsheet program.

Other potential names included Electroledger, Calculedger, Calcupaper, and Compulator. The spreadsheet—a simple, flexible, and incredibly powerful tool—quickly became the lingua franca of finance. Spreadsheets are now loved and loathed in equal measure. Their flexibility is useful, but also dangerous. Spreadsheets have been at the center of billion-dollar trading scandals and misguided economic policy prescriptions , among many other snafus.

The commonly held wisdom, backed by research , is that nine out of 10 spreadsheets contain errors, a sobering thought considering how far and wide the files are used in business, government, and beyond. For Bricklin, the spreadsheet is history. Since software patents were rare when he created VisiCalc, rival spreadsheet programs like Lotus and Microsoft Excel quickly emerged and cornered the market. You can still download a working version of VisiCalc from , which weighs in at a scant 27 kilobytes.

Bricklin later developed highly regarded prototyping software, early blogging tools, and a note-taking app for tablets. Now, as chief technology officer for Alpha Software, he is helping companies build mobile apps, the next frontier in personal computing. He spoke with Quartz from Boston about his role in computing history, and his thoughts on what comes next. The transcript of the interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Quartz: Do you ever step back and marvel at how ubiquitous the spreadsheet has become?

Before I did VisiCalc, I was also involved in the early days of screen-based word processing. That meant that computers would be everywhere. In those days, they were god-awful expensive. I came out of the word processing and typesetting worlds, where every keystroke counted. I was competing against the back of the envelope. If it took longer to input something on a spreadsheet, you would have done it by hand instead. So I tried to make it as simple as minimal as possible.

It was really important to make it easy to use. Lots of people were building software for financial forecasting using rows, columns, formulas, and all, but not put together the way the spreadsheet was, aimed for ease of use with a general-purpose, two-dimensional, word-processing-like layout. General-purpose tools have their advantages. They become widely used because you can use them for a wide range of tasks. The first version of Excel was released in for Mac.

Later in November , the first Windows version was released. It was a relatively small program with few basic capabilities. It could only calculate data within a matrix of 5 columns by 20 rows.

Frankston made the program fast and with better arithmetic.