Who invented MS Excel and in which year

How long have you been using Microsoft Excel?

Have you ever thought how Excel or the other electronic spreadsheet softwares came to existence?

In today’s post, we will go back in time to trace the origin of Excel. So, here we go:

While the origin of electronic spreadsheets can be traced back to 1978, but it wasn’t until 1982 when Microsoft jumped into the arena of Electronic spreadsheets with a product known as MultiPlan.

Muliplan was Microsoft’s first electronic spreadsheet program. It was introduced in 1982 as a competitor for VisiCalc (the first ever electronic spreadsheet program). The key difference between Multiplan and its competitors was Microsoft's decision to use R1C1 addressing instead of the A1 addressing which was introduced by VisiCalc.

Muliplan was very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost fame to Lotus 1-2-3. This thing motivated Microsoft to develop another spreadsheet product Excel.The first version of Excel was released in 1985 for Mac. Later in November 1987, the first Windows version was released.

It all started with VisiCalc:

In 1978, Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin developed a program called VisiCalc. It was a relatively small program with few basic capabilities. It could only calculate data within a matrix of 5 columns by 20 rows.
To make VisiCalc more powerful Bricklin hired Bob Frankston, who is also known as the co-creator of VisiCalc. Frankston made the program fast and with better arithmetic. VisiCalc was an instant success and the duo were able to sell around 1 million copies of the program.

Note: You can still get an original copy of Visicalc from Dan Bricklin’s website: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm  [size: 27 K]

What followed VisiCalc?

After the phenomenal success of VisiCalc, a team headed by Mitch Kapor in 1983, developed a new spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3. Mitch and his team power packed Lotus 1-2-3 with charting, graphing and rudimentary database capabilities along with the basic arithmetic. This made Lotus 1-2-3 a new favourite in the industry.

Although, before this in 1982 Microsoft had already launched Muliplan but it was outshined by Lotus 1-2-3. And this thing provoked Microsoft to come up with Microsoft Excel and rest is history.

The Infographic on History of Microsoft Excel:

This infographic takes a closer look at the history of Excel, circa 1978-2013.

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Microsoft Excel has been around since 1982, first introduced as Multiplan, a very popular CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), but lost popularity on MS-DOS systems to Lotus 1-2-3. In 1987, Microsoft introduced Excel v2.0 for Windows and by 1988 began to outsell Lotus 1-2-3 and the emerging QuatroPro. In 1993, Microsoft released Excel v5.0 for Windows which included VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), aka Macros. This opened up almost unlimited possibilities in automation of repetitive tasks for crunching numbers, process automation, and presenting data for businesses. 

Present Day Microsoft Excel

Flash forward to present day with the latest release of Excel 2019 and Excel365, Microsoft Excel is the most familiar, flexible, and widely used business application in the world due to its capability to adapt to almost any business process. Coupled with the use of other Microsoft Office applications, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc., there is little that cannot be handled by this very powerful combination.

The uses of Microsoft Excel and the Office Suite are almost limitless. Let us consider the top 10 list of most popular and powerful built-in Excel features:

1. Efficiently model and analyze almost any data
2. Zero in on the right data points quickly
3. Create data charts in a single cell
4. Access your spreadsheets from virtually anywhere
5. Connect, share, and accomplish more when working together
6. Take advantage of more interactive and dynamic PivotCharts
7. Add more sophistication to your data presentations
8. Do things easier and faster
9. Harness more power for building bigger, more complex spreadsheets
10. Publish and share through Excel Services

Now, add to this the ability to customize and automate any operation via use of VBA and you have a tremendous value added BI (Business Intelligence) platform that is flexible and creative enough to tackle almost and business need. 

Interested in leveraging Microsoft Excel for your business solutions? Trust the Excel Help experts. We’ve worked with businesses large and small across every industry. From household names to mom-and-pop shops, we can help you improve your workflows with Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft solutions.

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The Future of Excel

Where do we go from here? With the internet central to our lives and business, it makes sense that the needs of the many will prevail. As the Microsoft platforms continue to evolve, it becomes a full time job to stay up-to-date on the emerging technologies. Microsoft Excel will keep it’s position as the top platform to analyze data, create charts and presentations, and integrate with powerful tools for visual dashboards and BI workflows.

Business is moving more and more into cloud based computing for shear accessibility of data and collaboration. This is where we see the future of Microsoft Excel moving to a break-neck speed in the next few years to provide multi-user access to massive data for analysis, reporting, and considerable increases in efficiency and production.

In today’s competitive business environment, custom solutions are required to maintain the edge against competition and profits. Microsoft Excel consultancies are the foremost authorities for present and emerging technologies. Having an expert consultancy on retainer is paramount in harnessing the full power and efficiencies needed to compete in the 21st century. Contact us today for Excel solutions and Excel training.

In a year when big names from the digital realm profoundly affected the world—Mark Zuckerberg or Julian Assange, take your pick—it's appropriate to add one more: Douglas Klunder. While largely unnoticed, 2010 marked the 25th anniversary of perhaps the most revolutionary software program ever, Microsoft Excel, and Klunder, now an unassuming attorney and privacy activist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state, gave it to us.

These days, with daily life so intertwined with the digital world, it isn’t hard to acknowledge the ramifications of a Facebook or a WikiLeaks. Back in 1985, though, most folks still couldn’t understand why they’d want a personal computer (“Maybe I can keep my recipes on it?”), let alone contemplate how software might alter the course of human events. Reagan was in the White House, Wham! had the year’s top song (“Careless Whisper”), and Microsoft had yet to go public.

Yet if you had to pick a technological development that has fundamentally altered society, you could do worse than Excel. Sure, PowerPoint gets all the laughs for its clichéd role in the corporate environment. But Excel is the program that has launched thousands of startups and justified millions of layoffs, planned out household budgets and charted the course for complex securities that almost took down the economy. For better or worse, it is the software that has given everyone the means to play with numbers and ask, “What if?”

For Doug Klunder, the mission 25 years ago wasn’t so grandiose. As lead developer of Excel, he was handed the job of vaulting Microsoft—then known best for MS-DOS, the operating system in IBM’s PCs—to the forefront in business applications. “We decided it was time to do a new, better spreadsheet,” recalls Klunder, now 50, who joined Microsoft straight out of MIT in 1981 (part of the interview process included lunch with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at a Shakey’s pizza parlor).

The electronic spreadsheet was essentially invented in 1979 by software pioneer Dan Bricklin, who started up Software Arts with Bob Frankston and created VisiCalc. The technology took a huge next step in 1983 when Mitch Kapor’s Lotus Development Corp. rolled out Lotus 1-2-3, which integrated charts and spreadsheets in the same program. Soon IBM PCs, loaded with Microsoft’s MS-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3, were pushing aside mainframe terminals in corporate offices.

Microsoft already had its own spreadsheet, Multiplan, but lagged in sales behind 1-2-3. And so Klunder and a small team sequestered themselves in the Red Lion Hotel in Bellevue, Washington, for three days of meetings to plan out what Excel would look like. The group included Klunder’s friend Jabe Blumenthal, who was to become the program manager, along with Charles Simoyni—a Microsoft executive who would eventually become a billionaire and two-time space tourist—and Gates himself. They had a big paper tablet on an easel for notes, but spent most of the time arguing back and forth about how best to respond to 1-2-3, Klunder recalls.

With Excel already behind schedule, the decision was made to switch to Mac—a tumultuous change that prompted Klunder to leave Microsoft temporarily.

“There were two things that were the overriding goals,” Klunder says. “One was simply loading it up with features. The other—looking back know, it sounds kind of crazy. But at the time it was major. Speed, and speed of recalculation.” Those early PCs couldn’t crank through numbers the way today’s powerhouse machines can, with the result that changing a number in a spreadsheet could bring things to a halt while the change rippled through all the interconnected calculations.

Klunder and his team came up with “intelligent recalc,” an approach where the program updated only the cells affected by the data change rather than all the formulas in the spreadsheet. Klunder credits Gates with the idea for how to implement the feature—though he says Gates eventually told him he hadn’t implemented what he had in mind at all. Klunder thinks Gates misremembered the discussion, but adds, “Maybe he actually did have a more brilliant idea that now is lost forever.”

At the outset, the entire Excel development team was three people, and Klunder estimates he wrote a third of the original code himself. Before the program was done, that group had grown to nearly a dozen—still a far cry from the hundreds of developers teamed together on big applications today.

But Microsoft was a much different place then. Its IPO was still some months away; the Microsoft millionaires hadn’t yet been minted. (Klunder says the records aren’t clear, but he figures he was somewhere between employee No. 45 and No. 65.) When Excel kicked off, Microsoft, which today fills a corporate campus of dozens of buildings in Redmond, Washington, could still fit in one building (making it possible for Gates to drop by all parts of the operation). “The whole concept of him as the big boss was not nearly as much in play,” Klunder remembers. “This was before Microsoft went public. In many ways he was just one of the guys.”

The location was known simply as the Northup building on Bellevue’s Northup Way, and all the developers had private offices—some with windows, some on the inside. Klunder recalls voluntarily giving up his window office. “I was literally living in my office, sleeping just a few hours a night and cranking out code around the clock, and the window office got too cold at night.”

Odd as it might seem now, that first version of Microsoft Excel was designed for the Apple Macintosh. Originally it was to be a DOS program, but the industry was moving to graphical interfaces—the Mac had debuted in 1984, while Microsoft would introduce the first Windows late in 1985. With Excel already behind schedule, the decision was made to switch to Mac—a tumultuous change that prompted Klunder to leave Microsoft temporarily. “It caused a bit of a problem when I left in the middle,” he recalls. “Rather than trying to write everything down, I presented what was essentially a three-day lecture on Excel’s design … that was videotaped for reference.” Fortunately for the project, he returned.

Endless “beta” versions and elaborate testing procedures were still in the future. Microsoft had announced Excel earlier in 1985, promising a ship date of Sept. 30. Racing to meet that commitment, Klunder and his team worked late into the night on Sept. 29 and into the earlier hours of Sept. 30. “We were doing our last bug tests. We made our master disk and my boss drove to the disk duplicator to get it into a few stores so we could say we made our Sept. 30 date.”

While preparing the disks in the middle of the night, someone had the idea of changing the time stamp on the computer to disguise how close they were cutting their deadline. Then someone else loaded a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 and saw that it too had been finished in the wee hours of the morning, Klunder says.

They worried greatly about making the program error-free. “Even being kids and mainly doing what’s cool, we still had some awareness that people were putting in real dollar values [into spreadsheets]. The thing we thought could kill Excel and the future or spreadsheets was a math error,” Klunder says.

Looking at Excel today, despite the many changes and elaborate features that have been added over the years, Klunder still sees the foundation that he and his teammates worked on. He says he doesn’t necessarily notice things he wishes he had changed. “It’s more some of the things we threw in that I look at and wonder, why did we bother?” For instance, he says, some of the options in the “Paste Special” function still seem obscure. “We did them because it seemed really cool that we could,” he says.

Klunder went on to other roles, including lead developer of Microsoft Money, the personal-finance program. But by 1992, he was ready to move on. Long interested in how technology was affecting personal privacy, he began volunteering for the ACLU. “After a few years of that, people started assuming I was a lawyer. So I decided, what the heck, I’ll be a lawyer.” He earned a law degree from the University of Washington and has remained active on the privacy scene ever since.

“I thought it was pretty obvious early on the danger presented by technology and computing in terms of losing our privacy. I always had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with technology, and I still do,” Klunder says. On balance, though, he sees the personal-computing revolution as positive for privacy. “Prior to that, it was only large entities with technology. So at least there’s something of a level playing field. But now as we move to the cloud, all that may be reversing,” he says.

As for Excel, Klunder still considers it a powerful tool. But he harbors no illusions about how it can be abused. “It’s the same thing with PowerPoint—Excel lets things look professional, and people assume there’s substance behind it.”

Thomas E. Weber covers technology for The Daily Beast. He is a former bureau chief and columnist at The Wall Street Journal and was editor of the award-winning SmartMoney.com. Follow him on Twitter.