Microsoft Excel is a powerful program developed by Microsoft Company which aims at helping people in calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications in their work. Today, it is one of the most popular electronic statistics form in the world.

Microsoft Excel has become a crucial tool in the international workplace, providing basic database functionality, along with spreadsheet and calculation tools. While it is currently the market leader for spreadsheets, the history of excel shows that throughout the 1980s and 90s it faced significant competition from rival software platforms like Lotus Notes, Mosaic TWIN and the Paperback VP Planner. The original Microsoft spreadsheet program was called Multiplan - which began development in 1982 - but it was never as financially successful as Lotus Notes.

Interestingly, Excel was first developed for the Macintosh operating system beginning in 1984. It made use of graphical menus and the mouse, innovating strongly relative to the other major competitors at the time. Drop-down menus and a point and click interface helped to make it more usable to non-technical workers, and in turn helped to influence graphical user interfaces in other software and operating systems at the time.

As such, when Windows was launched in 1987, Excel was one of the most important and popular pieces of software for it. The early exploration of the graphical user interface for Windows had already been conducted and market tested by earlier versions of Excel. While it was certainly not the first spreadsheet software package, it was the first to provide a powerful combination of usability and functionality to business clients of all sizes.

Lotus was relatively slow to bring Lotus 123 to Windows, failing to predict the popularity of the operating system.

One of the major turning points in Excel was the inclusion of Visual Basic for Applications in 1993, which greatly increased the functionality of the software. In turn, it also encouraged a generation of professionals to learn the programming language, further solidifying the long term demand for Excel over other spreadsheet suites. Below is the Microsoft Excel History for Windows:

1987 - Excel 2.0 for Windows

1990 - Excel 3.0

1992 - Excel 4.0

1993 - Excel 5.0

1995 - Excel for Windows 95 (version 7.0)

1997 - Excel 97 - included in Office 97

1999 - Excel 2000 (version 9.0) included in Office 2000

May 31, 2001 - Excel 2002 (version 10.0) included in Office XP.

October 21, 2003 - Excel 2003 (version 11.0) included in Office 2003

November 30, 2006 - Excel 2007 (version 12.0) included in Office 2007

June 15, 2010 - Excel 2010 (version 14) included in Office 2010.

Learn more about <a href="http://entertainmentlover.blog.com/2012/04/05/excel-versions-that-you-dont-know/">Excel Versions that You Don't Know</a> here.