Microsoft Excel 2.1 included a runtime version of Windows 2.1Įarly 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. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so. This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing GUI software.
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.
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 1985. 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'. 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. 3.2 Exporting and Migration of spreadsheets.3.1 Microsoft Excel 2007 Office Open XML formats.There was special help for Lotus 123 converts, and Excel still has Lotus compatibility features, 30 years later. I’m glad nobody does stuff like that anymore. There were several exciting new features in Excel 2.2 – 8 colours! Multiple fonts on a sheet! No more 1 MB limit! Woohoo!Īnd look at those beautiful charts, with all those text boxes and shadow effects. It got the highest possible rating – 5 mice!Įxcel was certainly expensive ($395 US), but look at the size of the files – 728K for the application! In the September 1989 issue of MacUser, there was a short review of Microsoft Excel 2.2. This Find windows appeared, and you could drag inside the text box, to scroll across a list of the Excel developer names. To activate the Easter Egg, you had to go to cell IV16384, and press Shift+Command+J. It wasn’t all business though – did you know that there was an Easter Egg hidden in this old version of Excel? For example, create named ranges – you can refer to them in formulas and macros, and quickly to to those ranges with Go To Special. The article had several more Excel tips that are just as useful in Excel 2016 as they were in Excel 1.0. It helps you build complex charts quickly, and has other charting tools to help you save time. Get Jon Peltier’s Excel Charting Utility, if you work with charts in Excel. Apparently, what we now call Combination Charts were originally called Overlay Charts.
The Secrets of Excel article also has some good tips on building charts, and studying how the SERIES function works. You can even add colours and text to the numbers.
To see how it’s done in newer versions of Excel, take a look at Microsoft’s article on custom number formats. That tip still useful, but the formatting dialog box looks different now. Instead of choosing from a list of built-in formats, create custom number formats. The first tip was about custom number formatting.
I assume the author was using Excel 1.0, based on the Excel version history for the Apple Macintosh. So, I took a look at the article, to see how relevant the tips are in Excel 2016.
It’s described as a “collection of pro techniques and undocumented features. In the June 1987 issue of MacUser, there is a “Secrets of Excel” article, by Louis Benjamin.
Maybe I couldn’t afford to buy any before that, after spending so much on the Mac computer and dot-matrix printer. So far, the earliest Mac magazines that I’ve found were from 1987. Do you remember cleaning the roller balls from those things? We did get it upgraded to 512K, and we had an external floppy drive, but no hard drive.Īnd a very boxy-looking mouse. We had MacPaint and MacWrite, and did all kinds of wonderful things with those simple programs, on that little black and white monitor.Īnd yes, that original 128K Mac is still in the basement too. At first, there wasn’t much software available. We got our Macintosh computer in April 1984, when they were first sold in Canada. I wasn’t resting, I was researching! Here are some pro tips from Excel 1.0, and a review of the exciting new features in Excel 2.2. A couple of issues had articles on early versions of Excel (it started on the Mac), so that was a good excuse to stop working, and flip through the magazines. While clearing some of the boxes in the basement, I found a stack of old MacUser and MacWorld magazines.