Microsoft Multiplan To Excel: 25 Years Of Excel

Microsoft Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet program used by everyone - from average home user to scientists, engineers and researchers. Microsoft is celebrating 25 years of Excel and created a video of the history of Excel (included below). Through the video the early developers, programmers and managers talk about how a "Multiplan" evolved from a simple command-line program to full-fledged GUI based tool.

In 1982, Microsoft had a hot-selling spreadsheet product "Multiplan" that did well in international markets, but not in the USA. The USP of the product being portability. The program was created for CP/M (Control Program For Microcomputers) which would run on Intel 8080/85 processors. However, the program started losing popularity to Lotus-1-2-3. Microsoft's developer came together and started thinking they should evolve their software to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. The plan was to come up with new product that would replace Multiplan. The new project was codenamed "Odyssey". Odyssey was aimed at creating a better spreadsheet program, but it didn't do very well on the GUI part. Then a brilliant programmer named Douglas Klunder figured out how to do 2-dimension calculations simultaneously that helped Odyssey do calculations much faster than Lotus 1-2-3. By spring of 1984, Bill Gates & his team were convinced that they needed a program that was not only faster in operations, but also offered a better GUI so that any average user could use it.

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Microsoft Excel on Mac

The developer team focused on productivity and better GUI. Microsoft released their initial versions of Excel on Macintosh computers and then on Windows. It was only until 1995 when Microsoft switched from 16 bit Excel to 32 bit Excel. Since then, Excel has evolved both in performance and ease of use. There aren't any businesses on the planet that don't use Excel.

Check out following videos:-

Part I:



Part II: