50 Fun Facts About Microsoft Excel

In which year was the first version of Excel released?

It came out for the Mac on September 30, 1985; Windows users had to wait until late 1987.

Excel 1.0 was released for which platform?

Bill Gates redirected the project to the Mac in March 1984, which delayed it by nine months.

What was Excel's codename while in development from 1983?

It was designed to rescue Microsoft's spreadsheet business after its first product lost the DOS market to Lotus.

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

It ran on everything from the Commodore 64 to the TI-99/4A but never dented Lotus's grip on the PC.

Which program was the dominant PC spreadsheet by 1983 and Excel's great rival for a decade?

Its name promised spreadsheet, database and charts in one, though the database part was debatable.

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

It sold up to a million copies and is credited with prompting IBM to build the IBM PC.

The first spreadsheet program was written for which home computer?

It became the machine's 'killer app', turning a hobbyist computer into a business tool.

Bill Gates announced Excel in May 1985 at a joint New York press conference with which tech leader?

Relations soured later, but in 1985 Microsoft was one of the Mac's most important software partners.

That 1985 launch press conference was held at which Central Park restaurant?

The software itself did not go on sale until the end of September.

The first Windows release of Excel in 1987 was numbered what, to line up with the Mac version?

There was never a 1.0 for Windows - or any DOS version at all.

Because Microsoft's graphical environment had so few users in 1987, the first PC Excel shipped bundled with what?

It came out a month before Windows 2.0 and helped grow the Windows installed base.

Unlike Word, Excel never had a version for which operating system?

There were OS/2 releases in 1989-1991, but the PC always required a graphical environment.

Excel 95 was version 7.0 and Excel 2010 was version 14.0. Which two version numbers were skipped?

The first jump synchronised all Office apps on one number; the second is usually put down to superstition.

Which version introduced Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)?

Before that, macros lived in cells of special macro sheets with the .XLM extension.

Excel 4.0's Easter egg shows the Excel logo crushing which dancing digits?

It was a not-so-subtle jab at the rival spreadsheet Excel was overtaking at the time.

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

Its rooms featured the names and faces of the developers.

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

Microsoft stamped out such undocumented features from version 10 onwards.

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 version replaced menus and toolbars with the Ribbon?

Surveys found most users disliked the change at first, advanced users most of all.

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

That is 2 to the power of 20; the column limit rose to 16,384 at the same time.

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

Before 2007 the last of 256 columns was labelled IV.

Before Excel 2007, a worksheet was capped at how many rows?

That 2-to-the-16th limit is why old .xls exports silently truncate large datasets.

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

Macro-enabled workbooks use .xlsm instead, and the old binary .xls format is still readable.

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

It means any computation can, in principle, be expressed purely in formulas without VBA.

How many built-in functions did Excel 2016 have?

Microsoft sorts them into 14 categories, and 360 of them predate Excel 2010.

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

Lotus 1-2-3 deliberately faked the leap year to save memory, and Excel copied the bug on purpose.

The 1900 leap-year bug was deliberately copied into Excel for compatibility with which program?

The quirk has since been carried into the Office Open XML file format itself.

A workbook locked with the 'Protect Workbook' password is encrypted with which default key?

Because everyone knows it, that particular protection adds no real security.

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

Combined with 50,000 rounds of SHA-1, it cut brute-force attacks to hundreds of guesses per second.

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.

Sparklines, the tiny in-cell charts, arrived in which version?

That release also brought 64-bit support and a customisable Ribbon.

Flash Fill, Power View and Power Pivot all arrived in which version?

That release also added 50 new functions and a Windows Store app.

Dynamic array formulas that 'spill' were added in response to a feature of which rival?

They removed the need for Ctrl-Shift-Enter and are described as the biggest structural change since 2007.

In which year did Microsoft announce that Excel would support the Python language directly?

It rolled out first to Enterprise and Business subscribers.

PivotTables first appeared in which version?

The idea is credited to Pito Salas, whose Lotus Improv work earned him the title 'father of pivot tables'.

Which marketing-minded programmer founded Lotus Development Corporation?

He was a friend of VisiCalc's creators and had written software for it.

Which Excel developer temporarily quit Microsoft in 1984 to grow lettuce?

He had been the primary developer of Multiplan and came back to finish the job after his replacement had a heart attack.

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

Its unsolicited pop-ups annoyed so many users that Excel 2000 made it less intrusive.

A 2022 survey found office workers spend what share of their working time inside Excel?

Two-thirds of them said they open it at least once an hour.

Estimates of Excel's monthly users range from 750 million up to how many?

That puts it among the most-used pieces of software on the planet.

Britain's GCHQ has a hacking tool aimed at Excel security bugs codenamed what?

The attack relies on tricking a victim into opening a booby-trapped file.

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

The developers did not think they could port the engine natively to OS X in time.

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

Excel was also first to let users set fonts and cell appearance and to recalculate only dependent cells.

Which bundled add-in provides tools for optimisation and equation solving?

The Analysis ToolPak, by contrast, covers statistics such as regression and ANOVA.

The influential 2010 economics paper Growth in a Time of Debt was famously undermined by what?

Critics found coding errors and selective data exclusion in the authors' working spreadsheet.

How many significant figures of precision does Excel use in its calculations?

Excel can display up to thirty figures on request, but the extra digits are not the ones used in computation, so equality tests can misbehave.

How many human genes had been renamed by 2020 to stop Excel converting their symbols into dates?

The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee changed names such as MARCH1 to MARCHF1 and SEPT1 to SEPTIN1 under new guidelines published in Nature.

Which error does Excel's MOD function return when the result would be excessively large?

It is one of several Excel-specific quirks alongside its date limitations and misleading statistical functions.

In which version was the XML Spreadsheet (XMLSS) format first introduced?

It could not store VBA macros, and Office Open XML replaced it as the primary format in 2007.