What is Excel?
Microsoft Excel 5.0 is a graphical spreadsheet program that runs under the Microsoft Windows environment on PCs or on Apple Macintosh computers running Apple system software.
The History of Excel
Spreadsheets have had a long and honourable history. The first spreadsheet,
Visicalc, which came out on Apple II computers in 1978 was singlehandedly
responsible for the success of that computer, and some would argue for the PC
revolution that followed.
The next major milestone was Lotus 1-2-3 which came out with the IBM PC. It not only made spreadsheet formulae easier by using the more intuitive A1 referencing system (as opposed to Visicalc's R1C1 system) but also added graphics and set spreadsheets on the road to become major data presentation packages as well as complex calculation tools. Lotus was also the first spreadsheet vendor to introduce naming cells, cell ranges and spreadsheet macros. To date Lotus 1-2-3 is still the all-time best selling application software in the world.
The next milestone was Excel. Originally written for the 512K Apple Macintoshs in 1985, Excel was one of the first spreadsheet to use a graphical interface with true pull down menus and a mouse point and click. The spreadsheet instantly became easier to use than the archaic interface of PC-DOS products and many people bought Apple Macintoshes simply so that they could use Excel. Excel never did come out in a DOS version.
When Microsoft unveiled the original Windows in 1987, Excel was one of the first products to be written for it, and even now many people still use Excel 2.1 which was written to run under Windows version 2. When Windows finally took off with Version 3.0 in late 1989, Excel was its flagship product. It remained the only Windows spreadsheet for nearly 3 years and only received some real competition from other products in summer 1992.
Microsoft have often used Excel to promote new ideas and technologies. Excel 3.0 was the first major product to come out with a Toolbar, by which commonly used commands can be quickly accessed. Excel 4.0 was the first main product to support the Object Linking and Embedding technology. Excel 5.0 is now the first Microsoft application to support the Visual Basic for Applications Edition programming language. It is still widely regarded in the software world as state of the art Windows as well as spreadsheet software.
Excel can be used to perform a wide variety of tasks, which are listed below. This ubiquitous nature in its abilities mean that many people find that they only use about 25% of Excel's power. The list will help give an overview of the sorts of tasks Excel is capable of performing.
Data Presentation
At its simplest, Excel can be used for entering data into a regular format and
then printing it or copying it as a table. Excel has some very powerful
presentation facilities in its use of colour, borders, fonts, font styles and
number formats. In addition, Excel has the ability to arrange areas of
spreadsheet and graph as a set of slides and display them as a rolling picture
show on a PC monitor.
Calculator
At the next level of complexity, Excel can be used as a simple calculator.
Spreadsheets were originally used for this simple task, but with the immediate
advantage that the original figures could still be seen (and therefore
corrected) and that a change in the original figures brought about an instant
change in the result.
These calculations can either be done with simple arithmetic on cells (e.g. C1+C2), or else in the use of functions (e.g. SUM(C1,C2)). The increasing use of preprogrammed functions are much of the reason for Excel's amazing power and versatility.
Mathematical Modelling and Forecasting
Excel's functions and flexibility of structure mean that simple calculations
can be built up into complex calculations which, in turn, can be built up into
even more complicated calculations, and so on. This means that some very
complex work can be done with Excel. Add to this special tools for handling
these complicated calculations and you have in Excel a highly powerful tool for
performing simulations, mathematical modelling and financial forecasting.
Statistical Analysis Package
Many of the functions in a basic spreadsheet function set will be statistical
ones - average, variance, standard deviation. Excel has augmented these with
complex functions that will perform a complete test, regression analysis or
analysis of variance. Without recourse to a dedicated statistics package the
user of Excel can perform quite complicated statistical analysis on a body of
numerical data.
Programming Language
Not very long ago people who wanted to do any sort of numerical calculation and
analysis would often have to write their own programs in 3-GL languages such as
Pascal, Fortran or C. Nowadays many of these programs are written in
spreadsheets, either using standard spreadsheet techniques or by using macro
languages. Excel has now taken this one stage further by using Visual Basic,
already highly popular as a programming environment in its own right. The tasks
you can accomplish with Excel and Visual Basic for Applications range from a
simple demonstration of a process to highly complicated statistics teaching
programs with an interactive user interface.
