The Evolution of Microsoft Excel: Key Milestones and Features

Microsoft Excel was first released in 1985 for Macintosh. Surprisingly, it was not initially available on Microsoft's own operating system, MS-DOS, until two years later.

In Excel 2000, developers hid a secret game called 'Dev Hunter.' It demonstrated the program's versatility and Easter eggs tradition, blending work with play.

Excel was ahead of its time with the 'Share Workbook' feature, introduced in 1993, allowing multiple users to edit a workbook simultaneously, predating modern collaboration tools.

Before Excel's dominance, Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet software. Excel's superior graphics and mouse support, however, eventually won users over in the late 1980s.

Excel faced the '1900 Date System' issue, where it couldn't correctly interpret leap years. Microsoft kept it for backward compatibility, a decision affecting users even today.

Excel has an impressive limit of 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns per sheet. It's a vast playground for data, yet these boundaries remind us that even Excel has its limits.

Recent versions of Excel include AI features that allow users to type questions about their data in natural language, which Excel interprets to generate insights.