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Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel) is a spreadsheet-application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). It has been the most widely used spreadsheet application available for these platforms since version 5 in 1993[citation needed]. Excel is part of Microsoft Office.
[edit] History[edit] Excel 2.0Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which 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 Mac in 1985, and the first Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) in November 1987. Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by 1988 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. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 12, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2008. Early in 1993, 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.[citation needed] 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 program displays cells organized in rows and columns, and each cell contains data or a formula, 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, and enables users to perform mail merge. When Microsoft first bundled Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint into Microsoft Office in 1993, those applications had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel,[citation needed] 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. [edit] Excel 5.0Versions 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.[1] [edit] Excel 2000See also: Microsoft Office 2000 For most users, one of the most obvious changes introduced with Excel 2000 (and the rest of the Office 2000 suite) was a clipboard that could hold multiple objects at once. Another noticeable change was that the Office Assistant, whose frequent unsolicited appearance in Excel 97 had annoyed many users, was changed to be less intrusive. [edit] Versions[edit] Microsoft Windows
[edit] Apple Macintosh
[edit] OS/2
Versions of Excel up to 7.0 had a limitation in the size of their data sets of 16K (2^14=16384) rows. Versions 8.0 through 11.0 could handle 65K (2^16=65536) rows and 256 columns (2^8 as label 'IV'). Version 12.0 can handle 1M (2^20=1048576) rows, and 16384 (2^14 as label 'XFD') columns.[2] [edit] File formats
Microsoft Excel up until 2007 version used a proprietary binary file format called Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) as its primary format.[4] 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.[5] 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 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 were removed in Excel 2007 [6]. The file formats were mainly from DOS based programs. [edit] BinaryOpenOffice.org has created documentation of the Excel format.[7]. Since then Microsoft made the Excel binary format specification available to freely download.[8] [edit] Standard file-extensions
[edit] Office Open XMLMain article: Office Open XML Microsoft Excel 2007, along with the other products in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, introduces a host of new file formats. These form part of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification. The new Excel 2007 formats are:
[edit] Export and migration of spreadsheetsProgrammers 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. Attempts have also been made to be able to copy excel spreadsheets to web applications using comma-separated values. ExcelPackage is another open-source project that provides server-side generation of Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheets. [edit] VBA ProgrammingExcel supports programming through Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) which is a subset of Visual Basic. Programmers may write code directly using the Visual Basic Editor (VBE) which resides in a separate window from the spreadsheet. Programming with VBA allows spreadsheet manipulation impossible with standard spreadsheet techniques. The most common and easiest way to generate VBA code is by using the Macro Recorder. The Macro Recorder records the mouse and keyboard actions of the user and generates VBA code which is then contained within a macro. These actions can they be utilized again by running the macro. The VBA code of the macro can also be edited in the VBE. Certain features such as loop functions and screen prompts by their own properties cannot be recorded, but must be entered into the VBA module directly by the programmer. Macros can be activated using a button using the form menu, and advanced users can employ user prompts to create an interactive program. [edit] Software errorsCriticisms of spreadsheets in general also apply to Excel. See Spreadsheet shortcomings. Errors specific to Excel include accuracy, date limitations and the (now resolved) Excel 2007 display error. [edit] AccuracyDue to Excel's foundation on floating point calculations, the statistical accuracy of Excel has been criticized,[9][10][11][12] as lacking certain statistical tools. [edit] Excel MOD function errorExcel has issues with modulo operations. In the case of excessively large results, Excel will return the incorrect answer of #NUM! error.[13][14] [edit] Date problemsExcel incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year.[15][16] The bug originated from Lotus 1-2-3, and was purposely implemented in Excel for the purpose of backward compatibility.[17] This legacy has later been carried over into Office Open XML file format.[18] Excel also supports the second date format based on year 1904 epoch. The Excel DATE() function causes problems with a year value prior to 1900.[19] [edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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