About: Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Program

With the introduction of Windows 3.0 in 1990, Excel started to oversell Lotus 1-2-3 and acheived 1st place in most popular software. This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing grapical software. The current version is 11, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2003. Excel was the first spreadsheet allowing to define the visual looks of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, where only cells referenced by the cell being modified are updated, while previously spreadsheets recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command. 

Microsoft Excel, showing a default new spreadsheet When first bundled into Microsoft Office in 1993, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel, still the killer app on the PC at the time. Early in its life Excel became the target of a copyright lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named "Excel." As the result of the dispute Microsoft was required to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel" in all of its formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time this practice has slipped. Excel has extensive graphing capabilities, added support for Visual Basic for Applications as a scripting language in 1993 - aiming to add automation functionality, but making it a prime target for macro viruses. 

Excel offers a large number of user interface tweaks, but its essence is little different from the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc. Many versions have an Easter egg.