Microsoft Office Excel (also known as simply Microsoft Excel) is the most used spreadsheet program in the world today. With its variety of features and relatively low price, it’s hard not to see why. Excel is packaged as part of Microsoft’s Office Suite alongside MS Word and MS Database, among others.

The first version of Excel was released for the MAC in 1985. At the time, Lotus 1-2-3 was the best selling spreadsheet program. It wasn’t until Microsoft released Excel for their new version of windows (2.0) that it started to gain popularity. Lotus was very weary of bringing their 1-2-3 spreadsheet program to the new Windows operating system. This proved to be quite costly for them, as they started losing much of their market share. It was 1988 when Excel had started to outsell the Lotus 1-2-3. The popularity of Excel helped make Microsoft the leading PC software developer in the world. Although more expensive than Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel offered a variety of new features. One of these new features was the introduction of color and charts to their spreadsheet. For the first time people were able to make colored charts based on their data entries.

In 1993, Microsoft started to bundle the Excel spreadsheet alongside MS Word and MS Powerpoint. This package made for the ultimate must-have office software for companies everywhere. For one fixed price, companies could buy a software package that would take care of all their office needs. It was for this reason decided to name the bundled software “Microsoft Office”. Among the new features of Microsoft Office was its consistency among the software programs. All three programs were redesigned for maximum consistency. This made learning and working with the Office package much easier.

Since then, there has been a new version of Microsoft Excel every 2 years or so. Each version offered something unique and different, all while keeping the consistency and ease of use of previous versions. Among the new features added was the addition of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic. This new feature gave users the ability to automate tasks and provide user defined functions for worksheets.

While other spreadsheet programs have come and gone over the last 3 decades, only Microsoft Excel has been able to “stand the test of time”. Offering just enough new features and improvements in each version, justifies the purchase of the newer version.

Today Microsoft Excel is still the best selling and most used spreadsheet program in the world. It’s ease of use and integrated features with other Microsoft applications make it the perfect spreadsheet application.