When Was Excel Invented?

If you've ever wondered how Excel came to be sitting on what feels like every computer on the planet, the answer goes back further than most people expect.

Contents:

1. Quick Answer

2. The Spreadsheet That Came Before Excel

3. Excel's First Release

4. Excel Comes to Windows

5. How Excel Became the Standard

Quick Answer

Microsoft Excel was first released on September 30, 1985, but only for the Apple Macintosh. The Windows version didn't arrive until 1987. Excel was not Microsoft's first spreadsheet program, either. That was Multiplan, released in 1982.

The Spreadsheet That Came Before Excel

To understand Excel's origin, you have to go back to 1979, when a program called VisiCalc launched on the Apple II. VisiCalc is widely credited as the first practical spreadsheet application, and it was a genuine breakthrough. Businesses bought Apple IIs just to run it.

Lotus 1-2-3 arrived in 1983 for the IBM PC and quickly dominated the market. Microsoft had its own spreadsheet called Multiplan running at the time, but it couldn't compete with Lotus on the PC. So Microsoft built something new, designed from the ground up with a graphical interface in mind.

Excel's First Release

Microsoft released Excel 1.0 for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985. The Mac was the right home for it at the time. Its graphical user interface meant Excel could offer dropdown menus and a point-and-click experience that text-based DOS programs simply couldn't match.

Excel outsold Lotus 1-2-3 on the Mac almost immediately. The formula structure, the cell-reference system, and the overall layout set up in that first version are still recognizable in Excel today.

Excel Comes to Windows

Microsoft released Excel 2.0 for Windows in 1987. It shipped bundled with a runtime version of Windows 2.0, because most PC users at the time didn't have Windows installed. Essentially, buying Excel also meant getting Windows.

This was a smart move. As Windows grew in popularity through the late 1980s, Excel grew with it. By 1988, Excel had overtaken Lotus 1-2-3 in sales.

How Excel Became the Standard

Microsoft bundled Excel into the first version of Microsoft Office in 1990, alongside Word and PowerPoint. That packaging deal accelerated adoption enormously. Businesses buying Office got Excel automatically, and within a few years it had become the default spreadsheet tool in workplaces everywhere.

Major milestones after that include:

• Excel 5 (1993): Introduced VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which opened the door to macros and automation.

• Excel 97: Part of the Office 97 suite, which standardized the interface most users recognise from the 2000s.

• Excel 2007: Introduced the Ribbon interface and pushed the row limit from 65,536 to 1,048,576.

• Excel 2016 and beyond: Brought in modern functions like XLOOKUP, dynamic array formulas, and eventually Python integration.

If you want a broader look at where Excel sits today and what it can do, the general overview and history of Excel is worth a read.

So, in short: Excel is nearly 40 years old, started life on a Mac, and has been the world's dominant spreadsheet application for most of that time.