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What is Excel?
Microsoft Excel, MS Excel or simply Excel is an application software published by Microsoft , which provides digital support for accounting, financial, organizational and programming tasks through spreadsheets . It is part of the Microsoft Office package, which contains various office programs such as Microsoft Word , Microsoft Powerpoint, etc.
It is possibly the most popular program in your area in the world, published in different versions and updates since its very first appearance in 1985.
Among its offer of capabilities is the management of tables, formats and mathematical formulas , as well as pre-programmed functions, and their corresponding conversion to graphics of different nature.
His name was subject to controversy when another company, which already owned a software called Excel, won a lawsuit against Microsoft forcing them to use his name as part of the application, thus being born MS Excel, often named by the use of the letters XL , for its sound in English . Over time, however, Microsoft would buy the brand from its rival company and conquer all forms of product name.
This program belongs to Microsoft under a commercial license of use and works under Windows operating environments , Macintosh and some others, in various languages. However, there are parallel versions such as the OpenExcel or LibreExcel open source package, belonging to OpenOffice or LibreOffice respectively.
See also: Office automation .
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History of Microsoft Excel
The direct predecessor of this software was a spreadsheet management program published by Microsoft in 1982, called Multiplan, which was extremely popular on certain systems, but not enough to surpass Lotus 1-2-3 in Lotus Development, a competing company purchased by IBM in 1996.
In 1985, the first version of Excel for Mac appeared , and the first for Windows in 1987, giving the application the advantage over Lotus 1-2-3, which took a long time to migrate to that virtual environment. Thus, this gradually became the spreadsheet program par excellence for PC, surpassing even the popular Quattro Pro of the company Borland.
Since then, Excel has offered its public an updated version every two years , more or less, until reaching the current versions, which are v16.0 (Excel 2107). In the case of OS / 2 Operating System , the current version is 3.0, of 1991.
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What is Microsoft Excel for?
As it has been said, Excel is a system of spreadsheets, that is, of information management forms in an orderly and systematic way, allowing the automation of logical operations (arithmetic, geometric, etc.) and making life easier for accountants. , financial, information managers and even those who work with lists.
It is a versatile application especially useful for making tables, graphs and other operations of representing information, from a virtually infinite array of rows and columns that can be introduced and customized the data . In addition, Excel has a system of macros or automated formulas, which also allow its use for algorithm and programming purposes .
