Microsoft originally released what was to eventually become Microsoft Excel as a program called Multiplan, which was a very good spreadsheet but lost out to the extremely popular Lotus 123.

Microsoft then released Excel for the Macintosh in 1985 and a DOS based version was made available for the PC. The first PC windows version of Excel was released in 1987. Excel has always been an excellent spreadsheet program.

The preferred spreadsheet at the time was Lotus 123 which had one very annoying feature that kept tech support people busy. The program never actually deleted a row so over time, the spreadsheet would get so large that you wouldn’t be able to print it because most business PCs had very small hard drives and ran out of space trying to write the temporary print file. You had to extract the data into a new file periodically to avoid this problem. Excel didn’t have this problem which made it attractive to businesses.

Excel also had one major advantage over all of the other spreadsheets. Even in the DOS version, Excel spreadsheets have always been exportable to Microsoft word, which at that time had very limited capabilities. Once the windows version was released, you could copy and paste portions of your spreadsheet into your reports done in word. In my opinion, this cut and paste capability between applications is why Microsoft office is the preferred office productivity suite in the world.

Microsoft Excel was the first program that allowed the user to customize the appearance of a spreadsheet by configuring fonts, cell appearance, character attributes, etc. It also provided a feature called intelligent recomputation which made excel run faster than other spreadsheets because only cells dependant on a cell being changed would by updated. All of the other spreadsheets recalculated everything at each change or waited for the user to tell it to update.

The spread sheet shown below is one I use to compare potential jobs I apply for to see how much money I will actually have left after commuting expenses and saving money to replace my car. It helps me decide which job offer to accept.

 

Microsoft Excel also has extensive graphing and charting capabilities as in the two sample charts shown below. It also allows users to perform mail merges, which is why a lot of business use excel rather than Access for telephone and mailing lists.

 

In 1993, Microsoft added visual basic for applications to excel which allowed user defined functions to be created for use in worksheets. Later versions included a complete integrated development environment which included macro recording to automate user actions and make performing complicated tasks a lot easier for most users. The newer versions support using activeX, COM, DLLs and object oriented programming in keeping with the Microsoft philosophy of allowing users to have the maximum flexibility to customize their working environment.

Excel Troubleshooting

In all of the years I have been using Microsoft Excel, I’ve rarely has a serious problems with the application itself. However, sometimes the application just won’t open up. When that happens, you need to start Microsoft excel in the safe mode.

Use the following steps to start Microsoft excel in the safe mode:

• Select Start -> Run
• In the run dialog box, type excel.exe /s
• Microsoft Excel will open in the safe mode

Starting the program in the safe mode bypasses the following files:

• excel.xlb - this is the default toolbar file and sometimes it becomes corrupted. Rename it to excel.old. The next time you open excel, it will create a new toolbar file. This file is usually located in the Documents and Settings portion of your user profile.
• excel.pip - this file stores the menu usage data used to decide which commands to show in the menus based on the user’s actual usage. It can also become corrupted. Rename it to excel.oldpip. Excel will create a new file the next time it is opened. The file is located in c:\program files\microsoft\office\officeX, where the X is the version number of your application. I have office 2003 so my version number is 11

Adding Microsoft Excel Menus to Word

Sometimes you want to be able to use excel for a part of the document you are working on so you can use formulas. You can replace the word menus with excel menus without having to open excel and create a new document. I find this feature very useful when writing business plans where I need to perform some fairly simple calculations and sometimes chart the results. To embed an excel worksheet into a word document select Insert -> Object as show below.

 

Then select Microsoft Excel Worksheet as shown below and click Ok.

 

 

The embedded excel spreadsheet below looks like this when inactive with your data showing of course.

 

And like this when activated by clicking on the table. Notice that the excel menus have replaced the word menus.

 

You can also add Chart like the one below that taken from a business proposal created in Microsoft Word.