46 Fun Facts About Microsoft Excel

Which bank's 2012 London Whale loss was partly blamed on Excel?

JPMorgan Chase's risk model ran on Excel sheets completed by copying and pasting, and one formula divided by a sum instead of an average, lowering the risk it showed.

In an Excel formula, what do the dollar signs in $A$1 do?

Keep it fixed when copied: copy =B4*C4 down one row and it becomes =B5*C5, but =$B$4*$C$4 stays exactly the same.

Behind the scenes, how does Excel store a date such as 1 July 2025?

As a number: Excel counts days from a fixed starting date, so adding 10 to a date moves it ten days later.

Microsoft's first spreadsheet, launched in 1982 for CP/M, was called what?

Multiplan lost the DOS market to a rival, so Bill Gates chose to leave text-based DOS software behind and bet on graphical programs for the Mac and Windows.

Which Excel tool works backward, adjusting one input until a formula returns the result you want?

Goal Seek runs the sum in reverse: tell it the monthly loan payment you can afford, and it finds the interest rate that produces it.

What was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, released in 1979?

VisiCalc was co-written by a Harvard Business School student, and it is credited with turning personal computers into serious business tools.

The first personal-computer spreadsheet was written for which home computer?

Apple II: for its first year the program ran on nothing else, so buyers who wanted the $100 software added a $2,000 computer to the order.

Excel launched first on the Macintosh, so which tech leader joined Bill Gates to unveil it in 1985?

Steve Jobs shared the stage with Bill Gates, but later that year he lost a boardroom power struggle, left and founded NeXT.

Microsoft announced Excel in 1985 at which Central Park restaurant?

Tavern on the Green was built in 1870 as a sheepfold for the flock grazing Central Park's Sheep Meadow, and became a restaurant when the sheep left in 1934.

Which key makes Excel recalculate every formula in all open workbooks?

F9 is how you update formulas after switching Excel to Manual calculation, a mode that stops it recalculating after every edit.

When Excel reached PCs in 1987, what came in the box?

A cut-down runtime of Windows came in the box, and shipping it with Excel helped put Windows itself onto more PCs.

Which Excel function counts how many times a particular city appears in a customer list?

COUNTIF checks a single condition, so =COUNTIF(B:B,"Paris") tallies every Paris in column B, and COUNTIFS handles several conditions at once.

Microsoft's first Office suite bundled Excel and Word with which program?

PowerPoint wasn't built by Microsoft: it bought the program's maker, Forethought, for $14 million in 1987.

Which software company launched Quattro Pro, an early rival to Excel?

Borland beat a lawsuit over copying a rival's menus, yet it had already sold Quattro Pro to Novell by the time the case ended.

Which command on Excel's View tab keeps chosen rows or columns in sight while you scroll?

Freeze Panes locks rows or columns in place, so a big table's header row stays on screen while you scroll, until Unfreeze Panes releases it.

What was the name of the Doom-like mini-game hidden inside Excel 95?

The Hall of Tortured Souls hid photos of Excel's developers, which you could only reach by typing a secret word, excelkfa.

What kind of game was hidden as an Easter egg in Excel 97?

A flight simulator was one of the last big Excel eggs: from Excel 2002 on, Microsoft stripped such undocumented extras out of the product.

Excel 2000's hidden 3-D driving game was inspired by which arcade classic?

It was one of the last Excel Easter eggs before Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing push ended them.

Which interface did Excel 2007 bring in to replace its old menus and toolbars?

The Ribbon's design was patented, and in 2018 a US jury found that Corel had infringed Microsoft's interface patents.

Since Excel 2007, how many rows can a single worksheet hold?

1,048,576 rows is 2 to the 20th power, and opening a bigger CSV file brings a warning that saving will lose the rows that didn't load.

Since Excel 2007, what is the label of the far-right column in a worksheet?

XFD came with Excel 2007's switch from the old .xls format to .xlsx, which lifted the old limits on how big a sheet could be.

Whose Excel file lost nearly 16,000 COVID results?

Public Health England loaded lab results into old .xls templates, and once a file was full the extra results were simply left out.

The .xlsx format introduced in 2007 is defined by which standard?

Office Open XML files are zipped bundles of XML, so renaming an .xlsx file to .zip lets you open it up and read the parts inside.

The 2020 addition of the LAMBDA function gave Excel's formula language which computer-science property?

Turing completeness came because a LAMBDA function can call itself, so formulas alone can repeat a calculation that once needed a script.

Which Excel function did Microsoft announce as the successor to VLOOKUP?

XLOOKUP can return values from either side of the lookup column, while VLOOKUP can only look to the right.

Which non-existent date does Excel treat as real, for compatibility with an older rival program?

29 February 1900 is a bug copied from an older rival, and Excel keeps it because fixing it would shift the dates in files shared between programs.

Which program was the dominant PC spreadsheet by 1983 and Excel's chief rival through the 1980s?

Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the 1980s, but it was slow to reach Windows, and by the early 1990s Excel was outselling it.

Which error does Excel show when other data blocks the cells a dynamic array formula needs?

#SPILL! means something is in the way: clear the blocking cells and the formula fills the range by itself.

Excel 2007 switched password-to-open encryption to which algorithm?

AES replaced the weak 40-bit RC4 of Office 97 to 2003, and Excel 2007 also ran the password through SHA-1 50,000 times to slow down guessing.

Excel became an esport in 2020 with the launch of which competition?

Games such as Tetris, 2048 and Civilization have also been recreated inside spreadsheets.

Microsoft's earlier spreadsheet used which cell-addressing style, still available in Excel as an option?

In it, 'RC[-1]' means 'this row, previous column' - the same in every cell, unlike A1-style.

Which data-visualization pioneer coined the name of Excel 2010's in-cell sparklines?

Edward Tufte meant sparklines to be word-sized, so data could sit inside a sentence, table or headline instead of in a separate chart.

Which Excel feature can split full names into first names after you type just one example?

Flash Fill arrived in Excel 2013 and learns from your example, so it can also join first and last names from two columns into one.

Dynamic array formulas made which old keyboard shortcut for entering array formulas unnecessary?

Ctrl+Shift+Enter still works in older workbooks, but Microsoft says new array formulas no longer need it: they simply fill the cells beside them.

In 2023, Microsoft announced that Excel would run code in which programming language inside its grid?

Python in Excel sends the code to Microsoft's cloud through a new PY function, so users don't have to install anything on their own PCs.

Which Excel tool summarizes a table by dragging fields into rows and values?

PivotTable traces back to Pito Salas, who conceived the pivot table while designing a rival's next spreadsheet.

Which spreadsheet pioneer co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990?

Mitchell Kapor co-founded the EFF with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, forming it in response to US Secret Service raids.

Which element, just left of Excel's formula bar, shows the address of the selected cell?

The Name Box also names cells: select a range, type a name into the box and press Enter, and formulas can then use that name.

The paperclip Office Assistant that arrived with Excel 97 was officially named what?

Clippit was the default Office Assistant, and Microsoft later removed the whole feature: no Office release since 2007 has included it.

Which feature was dropped from Mac Excel 2008 and restored in Mac Excel 2011?

VBA macros were cut because Microsoft said moving them over to its new Mac tools would have added roughly two years of development.

Which time-saving feature - dragging a selection to copy and increment cells - debuted in Excel 4.0?

Auto-fill recognizes common series, so dragging a single 'Monday' down a column fills in the days of the week that follow.

Which bundled Excel add-in provides tools for optimization?

Solver can change many input cells together, which is why Excel's one-input what-if tool points bigger problems to this add-in instead.

The 2010 paper 'Growth in a Time of Debt', later undercut by a spreadsheet error, was widely cited to support what?

Austerity backers such as Paul Ryan quoted the paper, and a University of Massachusetts student checking it for homework later found the spreadsheet mistakes.

In Excel, what becomes of a typed number's 16th digit?

A zero replaces it, because Excel keeps only 15 significant digits, so long card or account numbers need to be entered as text.

In 2020, scientists renamed some of what because Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates?

Human genes were renamed first, and Microsoft later added a setting that stops Excel converting strings of letters and numbers into dates.

Which Excel feature adds drop-down arrows to column headings so you can show only rows that match?

Filter only hides the rows that don't match, so nothing is deleted, and clearing the filter brings every row back.