Spreadsheets have been around for hundreds of years. They were originally manually compiled on large sheets of paper by clerks and accountants to summarise financial or other data in columns and rows for business managers. So how did they get to where they are today?

The first computerised spreadsheet is attributed to Professor Richard Mattesich who, in 1961 developed an “electronic spreadsheet” for use in business accounting. Personal computers (PC’s) had not yet been invented, so the Mattesich spreadsheet ran on huge (and hugely expensive) mainframe computers installed by large corporations like AT&T, Bell and General Motors in Canada and the US.

In the early 1970’s, microprocessors began to replace the cabinets circuitry and valves in mainframe computers and the first micro-computers (later called personal computers) came onto the scene. The earliest were in kit form and used by hobbyists and technicians who had to write their own programs in low level machine code, or assembly language. Although the revolution had begun, there was no “easy” interface between a human and a computer, but that was soon to come.

In 1975, two young computer enthusiasts, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, had an extremely ambitious vision, a computer on every desk top and in every home. This duo formed a company named Microsoft (from micro-computer and software) and their plan was to write software that would make micro-computers accessible to the masses.

In 1978, another young computer enthusiast, Dan Bricklin, came up with the idea for a “visible interactive calculator”. His first prototype “spreadsheet” contained only five columns and 20 rows, so Dan recruited Bob Franklin to make the program more powerful and hence, more useful. Franklin did just that and compressed the code enough to make it practical for the “visible calculator” to run on a micro-computer. And so was born VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for a PC.

In the third quarter of 1978, Bricklin and Franklin were joined by Daniel Fylstra whose marketing skills saw VisiCalc achieve success in the market place and gave incentive to many businesses to invest in what at the time, were expensive micro-computers. During its lifetime, VisiCalc sold about a million copies.

In 1980, IBM contracted Microsoft to write an operating system for its IBM PC. The result was MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) that interfaced between a human and a computer (without having to use machine code) or enabled software like spreadsheets to run. The first IBM PC running MS-DOS was shipped in 1981 and a number of IBM clones, or compatibles, appeared on the market soon after.

VisiCalc was slow to respond to the introduction of the IBM PC with its Intel computer chips and a new, more powerful spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, came onto the market in 1983. 1-2-3 related to the (1) spreadsheet, (2) integrated charting and (3) database capabilities of the program. As well as being a powerful and relatively easy to use calculating tool, Lotus was a data presentation package. Consequently, it became a very popular and very successful spreadsheet application in the business world. In 1985, the Lotus Development Corporation, founded by Mitchell Kapor and Jonathan Sachs acquired and discontinued the use of VisiCalc.

Microsoft released a spreadsheet program called MultiPlan in 1982 for the CP/M operating system and it was subsequently modified to run on Apple, XENIX and MS-DOS operating systems. However, it never gained the popularity or market share of Lotus 1-2-3. In the meantime, Microsoft was working on a new disk operating system and in November, 1985, released Windows Version 1.0. Instead of typing MS-DOS commands, a mouse could be used to point and click on drop-down menus, icons and scroll bars and the now familiar “windows” and dialogue boxes made their first appearance.

The first version of Excel was also released in 1985, but it was for the Apple Mac running Mac OS, not for MS-DOS or the new Windows operating system — a smart move by Microsoft, because it did not put Excel into direct competition with Lotus 1-2-3 and gave it an advantage. Excel 1.0 running on the Mackintosh with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) had point and click capability, unlike the keyboard driven Lotus 1-2-3 and MultiPlan, and many businesses purchased Macs to take advantage of the easy to use graphics based Excel.

Windows 2.0 was released in December, 1987 and at about the same time the first Windows based version of Excel (v2.0) for PC’s was released. It was another three years before Lotus and a spate of other vendors released spreadsheet programs for the Windows operating system and Excel, as Microsoft’s flagship program during that period gained popularity. During 1988 Microsoft became the world’s leading PC software company based on sales and PC’s were beginning to take a serious step towards achieving the Allen/Gates “computer on every desk” vision. Spreadsheets were largely responsible for the rapidly increasing use of desk top computers as a business tool.

Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 3.1 (1992) sold 10 million copies in their first two years and Excel 3.0 (for Windows), also released in 1990 proved popular. Although Lotus 1-2-3 maintained a reasonable market share, it had missed the boat by not launching a Windows version and was comprehensively overhauled by Excel 4.0 (1992) which was the first version of Excel to be bundled with Word and PowerPoint under the banner of “Microsoft Office”.

Excel 5.0 (1993) was a major upgrade and included multiple worksheets and support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, i.e. macros).

1995 saw some significant improvements with the highly publicised release of the 32 bit Windows 95 operating system which sold seven million copies in the first five weeks. Windows 95 was an upgrade to MS-DOS and earlier versions of Windows that between them were running on about 80% of the world’s PC’s. It featured the first appearance of the Start menu, taskbar and minimize, maximize and close buttons on each window, had built-in Internet support, dial-up networking and plug-and-play capability that made it easy to install new hardware and software. 1995 was also the year the Internet really took off with widespread use of electronic mail (e-mail) and the World Wide Web (information on any subject available at the fingertips of anyone with a connected PC).

Excel, along with other Office 95 programs, was released in a 32 bit version and re-branded as Excel for Windows 95 or simply Excel 95 (this was actually version 7. There was no version 6).

Excel 8.0, known as Excel 97, included a new VBA interface and introduced some new features like user forms and data validation. Versions 9.0 to 11, known as Excel 2000, Excel 2002 and Excel 2003 introduced relatively minor improvements and during this period Windows also went through various evolutionary upgrades with Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me (for home computers) and the new look Windows XP (2001). The 64 bit XP version was the first Microsoft 64 bit operating system and offered considerable operating improvements over previous versions.

Windows Vista, released in 2006 and Excel 2007 (version 12) both introduced major changes in both appearance and functionality.

The drop-down text menus from earlier versions of Excel were replaced by icon studded ribbons in Excel 2007, the number of columns increased from 256 to 16,384, the number of rows increased from 65,536 to 1,048,576 (there were only 16,384 rows up to and including Excel 95). Considerable enhancements were made to features like sorting, filtering and conditional formatting and files were saved in a new file format, the Open Office XML format. Enter “new file formats” into the search field of the Excel 2007 Help window for details about the new file format.

In spite of all the changes to Excel 2007, it maintained backward compatibility to previous versions of Excel, i.e. Excel 2007 can be used to open, edit and save.xls files created in earlier versions of Excel.

In October, 2009, Windows 7 (with many new features) was released and soon became the fastest selling operating system in history, selling seven copies per second — and by this time, laptops were out-selling desk top PC’s.

The latest release of Excel was version 14 or Excel 2010 (there was no version 13). It had some new features, but as with several previous versions of Excel, it did not introduce any major changes. And that’s where we’re at today.

Computer technology and software development has progressed at a furious rate from the first primitive PC’s running “electronic spreadsheets” to what we have today, much of it due to the ambitious vision of those two young computer enthusiasts in 1975, whose spreadsheet now reigns supreme. It could be said, in developed countries at least, that the Allen/Gates vision has been realised.

What next? The mind boggles!

If you would like more information about the history of spreadsheets or Windows, Google for spreadsheet+history, VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel+history or Windows+history. And if you’d like to learn how to use Excel to its full potential, get yourself a good Excel book.

Note: The words Excel, Microsoft, Visual Basicand Windowsare Registered Trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

James F. Pearson has 16+ years experience using Excel and is the author of the JP Excel Training Files, a couple of comprehensive and unique books about Excel — unique because they are written in Excel work books. Visit http://www.jpexceltraining.com/ to download a copy of the JP Excel Training Files or one of the free Excel files that is available from Jim’s web site.