Microsoft Excel celebrates 30th birthday!

Microsoft Excel developers are celebrating the 30th birthday of Microsoft Excel.

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/recalc-or- ... -the-odds/

Microsoft Excel 1.00 was released at the end of September in 1985. Version 1 was only available for the Apple Macintosh.

At the time, Microsoft only offered their earlier Multiplan spreadsheet product for MS-DOS, and no spreadsheet at all for Windows 1.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the increasingly dominant spreadsheet on the IBM PC, having unseated the original VisiCalc spreadsheet.

The first version that came to the IBM PC was Excel 2.0 in 1987. Excel 2.0 was a Windows 2 application bundled a Windows 2 runtime.

Excel continued to be available for the Macintosh, and version 2.2 was also ported to OS/2 1.x.

Excel and Microsoft's other office products really took off when people began to embrace Microsoft Windows 3.0. In part, this was because other vendors were (for whatever reasons) slow to port their products to Microsoft Windows.

And that success continued on in to the Windows 9x era and to the present.

Now, if only someone would kill it :P

Comments

  • Happy birthday to you, Excel :) I still use it by the way... just not as much than I used to though but it's handy for some things.
  • Ah, Excel. The only program I really use besides Word out of all the Office 'Professional Plus' applications.

    I don't use it for much. Typically, I'm using it to make budgets or invoices, or to make a chart(s) or table outlining something best shown in a visual/graphic form. It's easier than trying to do a layout in Word or Publisher for things like this:

    excel_sample.png
  • I'd class Excel is essential, whereas word is optional. The versatility is astounding. I discover new shit everytime I do something with it.
  • I work in the energy industry, and using Excel is essential as many systems rely on CSV files for importing/exporting. Otherwise using Access followed by Word would be in the order of usage.

    Spreadsheets regardless of whether it was used with Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, etc. is really what contributed to the success of PCs in the office environment.

    Has anyone tried the newly released Office/Excel 2016?
  • I forgot to mention, but although Winworld has several 1.x versions, we do not have the very original Excel 1.00. If anyone happens to have that, please do send it our way. And manual scans would be appreciated too.
  • Has anyone tried the newly released Office/Excel 2016?

    I tried the preview versions, haven't used the RTM.

    It was pretty much like 2013 except a few visual improvements.
  • I remember reading that if you messed around with some shit in newer Windows versions of office, that you could get the DOS version of Word to load up. I wonder how I could do that, and if it could be done to get the DOS version of Excel.
  • There was never a DOS version of Excel. Unless you count the Windows 2 version bundled with the Windows 2 runtime as "for DOS".

    What you probably heard was that Word 5.5 for DOS was available on Microsoft's FTP.. (Part of a Y2K update that happened to include the entire EXE).

    Of course, neither will run on 64-bit Windows without an emulator like DOSBox.
  • SomeGuy wrote:
    There was never a DOS version of Excel. Unless you count the Windows 2 version bundled with the Windows 2 runtime as "for DOS".

    What you probably heard was that Word 5.5 for DOS was available on Microsoft's FTP.. (Part of a Y2K update that happened to include the entire EXE).

    Of course, neither will run on 64-bit Windows without an emulator like DOSBox.

    Huh, I didn't know that it wasn't available for MS-DOS. I don't know why I got that idea.

Leave a Comment

BoldItalicStrikethroughOrdered listUnordered list
Emoji
Image
Align leftAlign centerAlign rightToggle HTML viewToggle full pageToggle lights
Drop image/file