Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The History of Spreadsheets - Excel for Data


Payroll sample
Payroll sample

Every enlightened human alive should be well acquainted with spreadsheets. 

Why so?

Spreadsheets are a path way to financial control and prudence in today's modern world.

Spreadsheets development summary

·         In 1978, Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin developed a program called VisiCalc.

·         SuperCalc was developed by Sorcim, bundled along with WordStar.

·         In 1983, Mitch Kapor’s team developed a spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3, although Microsoft had already developed Multiplan in 1982 that Lotus 1-2-3 outshined.

·         1985, Microsoft Excel (Excel 1.0) with graphical interface and other exciting features at that time.

·         Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel)

·         A spreadsheet program was written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and for Apple Macintosh computers.

·         Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982.

·         The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and for Windows November 1987.

·         Lotus 1-2-3 had popularity by that time, yet by 1988 Excel had started to outsell 1-2-3 and helped Microsoft achieve the position of the leading PC software developer.

·         The accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing graphical software.

·         Excel features an intuitive interface and capable calculation and graphing tools, pivot tables, and except for some Mc editions,

·         A macro programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which, along with aggressive marketing, have made Excel one of the most popular business applications to date.

·         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 to the other program.

·         Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program;

·         While this is no longer common, the program's icon 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 cells are organized in rows and columns, and contain data or formulas with relative or absolute references to other cells.

 

Microsoft Excel

·         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 re-computation, 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.

·         When first bundled into Microsoft Office in 1993, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel, 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 (OOP) 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 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.


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