Microsoft

HI Claire,

Thank you for your post, and welcome to the forum,

In answer to your question; Excel has changed quite considerably since it was first launched, it has been improved immensly since it was first introduced, to try to explain how much would probably take all evening. For example, when it was first introduced it was distributed on a single floppy disk less than 1.44 Mb in size, today in version 2007 it requires a DVD 4.7 Gb to include all of Microsoft Office (mind you was that an improvement?) Honestly a whole host of new operations have been included and finally with 2007 we now have a complete new interface which is much more user friendly and web orientated than ever before.

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. The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version was released in November 1987. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 12, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2008.

If this answer has been useful to you please click the Resolved button, if you want to ask another question, please come back, best regards Pete.