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History of Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel) is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and for Apple Macintosh computers. It features an intuitive interface and capable calculation and graphing tools which, along with aggressive marketing, have made Excel one of the most popular microcomputer applications to date. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms and has been so since version 5 in 1993 and its bundling as part of Microsoft Office.
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History
Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which was very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. This promoted development of a new spreadsheet called Excel which started with the intention to, in the words of Doug Klunder, 'do everything 1-2-3 does and do it better'.
The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (numbered 2.0 to line-up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) was released in November 1987. Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by 1988 Excel had started to outsell 1-2-3 and helped Microsoft achieve the position of leading PC software developer. This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing graphical software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 11, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2003. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2004.
Early in its life Excel became the target of a trademark lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named 'Excel' in the finance industry. 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 been ignored, and Microsoft cleared up the issue permanently when they purchased the trademark to the other program. Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program; while this is no longer common, the program's icon still consists of a stylised combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is .xls.
Excel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc: the cells are organised in rows and columns, and contain data or formulas with relative or absolute references to other cells.
Excel was the first spreadsheet that allowed the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are updated (previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command). Excel has extensive graphing capabilities.
When first bundled into Microsoft Office in 1993, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel, the killer app on the PC at the time.
Since 1993, Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic which adds the ability to automate tasks in Excel and to provide user defined functions (UDF) for use in worksheets. VBA is a powerful addition to the application which, in later versions, includes a fully featured integrated development environment (IDE). Macro recording can produce VBA code replicating user actions, thus allowing simple automation of regular tasks. VBA allows the creation of forms and in-worksheet controls to communicate with the user. The language supports use (but not creation) of ActiveX (COM) DLL's; later versions add support for class modules allowing the use of basic object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques.
The automation functionality provided by VBA has caused Excel to become a target for macro viruses. This was a serious problem in the corporate world until antivirus products began to detect these viruses. Microsoft belatedly took steps to prevent the misuse by adding the ability to disable macros completely, to enable macros when opening a workbook or to trust all macros signed using a trusted certificate.
Versions 5.0 to 9.0 of Excel contain various Easter eggs, although since version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented features from their products. [TOP]
Versions
Versions for Microsoft Windows include:
2007 Excel 12.0 (Office 2007, Available currently as a Beta from the Microsoft Office Excel Site)
Versions for the Apple Macintosh include:
1985 Excel 1.0
1988 Excel 1.5
1989 Excel 2.2
1990 Excel 3.0
1992 Excel 4.0
1993 Excel 5.0
1998 Excel 8.0 (Office '98)
2000 Excel 9.0 (Office 2001)
2001 Excel 10.0 (Office v. X)
2004 Excel 11.0 (Office 2004)
Versions for OS/2 include:
1989 Excel 2.2
1991 Excel 3.0
Watch Video – How to Track Changes in Excel
If you work with an Excel file that needs to be updated or reviewed by other people, the option to track changes can come in handy.
You can also use it when you’re updating a file and need to keep a track of all the changes you do yourself. This can be helpful when you revisit it sometime later.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to track changes in Excel.
Enabling the Track Changes in Excel Feature
By default, this feature is disabled in Excel.
Here are the steps to enable track changes in Excel:
- Go to the Review tab.
- In the Changes group, click on the Track Changes option and select Highlight Changes.
- In the Highlight Changes dialog box, check the option – ‘Track changes while editing. This also shares your workbook’. You can also specify the ‘When’, ‘Who’, and ‘Where’ options. For this tutorial, I will go with the default settings.
- Click OK.
The above steps would enable ‘Track Changes’ in Excel and now it will highlight any change done to the workbook.
Note: For this option to work, you need to have the workbook saved on your system or a network drive. If the file has not been saved, it will first ask you to save it before enabling the ‘Track Changes’ option. If the file is already saved, it will still save it before enabling the tracking.
How do ‘Track Changes’ work in Excel?
Once you have enabled the tracking, whenever you or anybody who accesses the workbook makes any changes to it, it will get highlighted with a blue border and get a small blue triangle in the top left of the cell. This is similar to the red triangle you see when you insert a comment in a cell.
For example, below I have a dummy project plan and I have made changes in column B (cell B4 and B6).
When you hover the cursor over the cell that has a change, it will show a message that specifies what the change is, who made the change, and when it was done.
Note that when ‘track changes’ option is enabled in Excel, the workbook is shared and some of the features are automatically disabled. For example, you will not be able to protect a sheet when ‘track changes’ are ON. You will notice that some of the options in the ribbon are grayed out.
Getting a List of All the Changes
If you have a workbook that has a lot of changes made to it, you may want to get a list of all the changes separately as a list.
Here are the steps to get a list of all the changes in a new worksheet:
- Save the workbook so that the changes that are made are saved as well.
- Go to the Review tab.
- In the Changes group, click on Track Changes and select Highlight Changes.
- In the ‘Highlight Changes’ dialog box, check the option – ‘List changes on a new sheet’. In the ‘When’ option, you can specify if you want all changes or changes that are not reviewed or ‘changes since last saved’.
- Click Ok.
This will instantly create a new worksheet that will list all the changes that you have made.
Accepting/Rejecting Changes
When the changes are made, these are not final until you review these changes. This can be useful when you have the reviewed file from your colleague/boss/client, and you have to decide on what changes are to be kept and which ones are to be rejected.
Here are the steps to accept/reject changes in Excel:
- Go to the Review tab.
- In the Changes group, click on the ‘Track Changes’ and select ‘Accept/Reject Changes’.
- In the ‘Select Changes to be Accepted or Rejected’ dialog box, specify the When, Who, and, Where options.
- In ‘When’ you can select all changes that have not been reviewed or specify a date.
- In ‘Who’ you can select whose changes you want to review.
- In ‘Where’, you can select a range of cells in which you want to review the changes.
- Click Ok. This will open the ‘Accept or Reject Changes’ dialog box.
- In the ‘Accept or Reject Changes’ dialog box, you can accept changes one by one, or accept/reject all changes at once.
Who Made Microsoft Excel
If you reject a change, it will revert back to the original value.
Note that when you accept a change, you can not undo it.
Disabling Track Changes in Excel
Once your work is finalized, you can disable the track changes feature in Excel. That will remove any existing blue box in the cells and will stop tracking any further changes.
Here are the steps to disable ‘track changes’ in Excel:
- Go to the Review tab.
- In the Changes group, click on the ‘Track Changes’ and select ‘Highlight changes’.
- In the ‘Highlight Changes’ dialog box, uncheck the option – ‘Track changes while editing. This also shares your workbook’.
- Click OK.
- You will see a prompt as shown below. Click on Yes.
Difference Between Comments and Track Changes
I Need Excel
A lot of people prefer adding comments while reviewing other people’s work in Excel.
Here are the major differences in ‘comments’ and the ‘track changes’ functionality:
- You don’t need to edit a cell’s content in order to leave a comment. Track changes, on the other hand, would insert a note whenever there is any change in the cell.
- Adding comment is a manual process, while track changes, when enabled, would automatically record everything that happens in the worksheet.
- You can not get a list of all the comments separately in a worksheet (unless you use VBA as shown here) while you can get it with the tracking functionality with a simple click.
- When you enable track changes in Excel, some of the functionalities are disabled. This is not the case with comments.
You May Also Like the Following Tutorials:
- How to Use Spell Check in Excel.