Microsoft Excel Trivia
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46 free Microsoft Excel trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Excel trivia for accountants, analysts, teachers and anyone who has ever lost an afternoon to a VLOOKUP. The quiz traces the spreadsheet's story from VisiCalc on the Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC, through Excel's 1985 launch alongside Steve Jobs, the first Windows version that had to ship with its own copy of Windows, the arrival of VBA and PivotTables, the Ribbon, and the modern era of dynamic arrays, LAMBDA and Python. There is plenty of fun in between: the hidden flight simulator and Doom clone, the dancing 1-2-3 Easter egg, the fake 29 February 1900, the 'VelvetSweatshop' password, skipped version numbers, row and column limits, the paperclip's real name and the day Excel became an esport. Difficulty runs from easy questions any office worker can answer to expert questions for the people who know what XFD means. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bank's 2012 London Whale loss was partly blamed on Excel?
JPMorgan Chase
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.
Q 02In an Excel formula, what do the dollar signs in $A$1 do?
Keep it fixed when copied
Keep it fixed when copied: copy =B4*C4 down one row and it becomes =B5*C5, but =$B$4*$C$4 stays exactly the same.
Q 03Behind the scenes, how does Excel store a date such as 1 July 2025?
As a number
As a number: Excel counts days from a fixed starting date, so adding 10 to a date moves it ten days later.
Q 04Microsoft's first spreadsheet, launched in 1982 for CP/M, was called what?
Multiplan
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.
Q 05Which Excel tool works backward, adjusting one input until a formula returns the result you want?
Goal Seek
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.
Q 06What was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, released in 1979?
VisiCalc
VisiCalc was co-written by a Harvard Business School student, and it is credited with turning personal computers into serious business tools.
Q 07The first personal-computer spreadsheet was written for which home computer?
Apple II
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.
Q 08Excel launched first on the Macintosh, so which tech leader joined Bill Gates to unveil it in 1985?
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs shared the stage with Bill Gates, but later that year he lost a boardroom power struggle, left and founded NeXT.
Q 09Microsoft announced Excel in 1985 at which Central Park restaurant?
Tavern on the Green
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.
Q 10Which key makes Excel recalculate every formula in all open workbooks?
F9
F9 is how you update formulas after switching Excel to Manual calculation, a mode that stops it recalculating after every edit.
Q 11When Excel reached PCs in 1987, what came in the box?
A cut-down runtime of Windows
A cut-down runtime of Windows came in the box, and shipping it with Excel helped put Windows itself onto more PCs.
Q 12Which Excel function counts how many times a particular city appears in a customer list?
COUNTIF
COUNTIF checks a single condition, so =COUNTIF(B:B,"Paris") tallies every Paris in column B, and COUNTIFS handles several conditions at once.
Q 13Microsoft's first Office suite bundled Excel and Word with which program?
PowerPoint
PowerPoint wasn't built by Microsoft: it bought the program's maker, Forethought, for $14 million in 1987.
Q 21Since Excel 2007, what is the label of the far-right column in a worksheet?
XFD
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.
Q 22Whose Excel file lost nearly 16,000 COVID results?
Public Health England
Public Health England loaded lab results into old .xls templates, and once a file was full the extra results were simply left out.
Q 23The .xlsx format introduced in 2007 is defined by which standard?
Office Open XML
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.
Q 14Which software company launched Quattro Pro, an early rival to Excel?
Borland
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.
Q 15Which command on Excel's View tab keeps chosen rows or columns in sight while you scroll?
Freeze Panes
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.
Q 16What was the name of the Doom-like mini-game hidden inside Excel 95?
The Hall of Tortured Souls
The Hall of Tortured Souls hid photos of Excel's developers, which you could only reach by typing a secret word, excelkfa.
Q 17What kind of game was hidden as an Easter egg in Excel 97?
A flight simulator
A flight simulator was one of the last big Excel eggs: from Excel 2002 on, Microsoft stripped such undocumented extras out of the product.
Q 18Excel 2000's hidden 3-D driving game was inspired by which arcade classic?
Spy Hunter
It was one of the last Excel Easter eggs before Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing push ended them.
Q 19Which interface did Excel 2007 bring in to replace its old menus and toolbars?
The Ribbon
The Ribbon's design was patented, and in 2018 a US jury found that Corel had infringed Microsoft's interface patents.
Q 20Since Excel 2007, how many rows can a single worksheet hold?
1,048,576
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.
Q 24The 2020 addition of the LAMBDA function gave Excel's formula language which computer-science property?
Turing completeness
Turing completeness came because a LAMBDA function can call itself, so formulas alone can repeat a calculation that once needed a script.
Q 25Which Excel function did Microsoft announce as the successor to VLOOKUP?
XLOOKUP
XLOOKUP can return values from either side of the lookup column, while VLOOKUP can only look to the right.
Q 26Which non-existent date does Excel treat as real, for compatibility with an older rival program?
29 February 1900
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.
Q 27Which program was the dominant PC spreadsheet by 1983 and Excel's chief rival through the 1980s?
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the 1980s, but it was slow to reach Windows, and by the early 1990s Excel was outselling it.
Q 28Which error does Excel show when other data blocks the cells a dynamic array formula needs?
#SPILL!
#SPILL! means something is in the way: clear the blocking cells and the formula fills the range by itself.
Q 29Excel 2007 switched password-to-open encryption to which algorithm?
AES
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.
Q 30Excel became an esport in 2020 with the launch of which competition?
Financial Modeling World Cup
Games such as Tetris, 2048 and Civilization have also been recreated inside spreadsheets.