Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel (also sometimes called Microsoft Office Excel) is a spreadsheet program created by Microsoft Corporation for Microsoft Windows, Windows NT and Mac OS. It provides economic and statistical calculation capabilities, graphical tools and, with the exception of Excel 2008 for Mac OS X, the VBA macro programming language (Visual Basic for Applications). Microsoft Excel is part of Microsoft Office and today Excel is one of the most popular applications in the world.

History

2023: Python Integration

The company, Microsoft which since 2020 employs Guido van Rossum, the creator of the language, programming Python announced integration Python in a tabular form. processor Excel Python can be used in Excel to write formulas, work with, data analyze information , and form diagrams. Python code is added to cells, processed by analogy with macros and functions, but executed not locally, cloud but in Microsoft Cloud. This became known on August 22, 2023.

Python support is implemented through the execution of the Anaconda Distribution for Python distribution in a separate isolated environment in Microsoft Azure. Many Python libraries are available for use in Excel, such as pandas for data manipulation, statsmodels for statistical modeling, Matplotlib and seaborn for information visualization.

For August 2023, the ability to use Python is already available in the beta version of the Microsoft 365 cloud office suite, and starting with build 16818 it will be added to Excel for Windows^[1].

2022: Default Macro Lock

On February 8, 2022, it became known that Microsoft will block the execution of VBA macro scripts in five Microsoft Office applications by default. Since the beginning of April 2022, Microsoft Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word users will not be able to include macro scripts in unreliable documents downloaded from the Internet. Read more here.

2021: Spreadsheets accounted for 20% of attachments used to deliver malware

On February 20, 2022, HP Inc. announced the release of the HP Wolf Security Threat Insights Report, which analyzed the 2021 cyber attacks that occurred in the IV quarter . After studying the threats that managed to bypass security systems and reached the end devices of users, HP Wolf Security specialists drew conclusions about the methods of attacks used by cybercriminals.

According to the company, the HP Wolf Security research group discovered a wave of add-on attacks, with Excel which attackers spread malicious code and gain access to devices and networks in order to then kidnap data enterprises or individuals. The number of attackers using malicious Microsoft Excel add-in files (.xll) to infect their victims' systems has increased by almost 7 times compared to last quarter. Such attacks turned out to be very dangerous, because to start the malware ON , you just need to click on the one sent by the cybercriminal. to the file The team also found in " Darknet advertizing droppers" software (to deliver and run.xll files) and entire sets for creating programs that make it easier to conduct similar campaigns for inexperienced attackers. More. here

2020: Ability to specify new data types

On October 29, 2020, Microsoft announced that new types of data will be available in Excel that users can create based on their own information. For example, you can import a structured array into a program and classify its type as "client." To do this, you will need to publish the data to Power BI or use the Power Query add-in.

Before that, only a formula or a specific value could be entered in one cell. Now a much larger amount of information is placed in one cell, connected to different sources, which will change in real time. In order to work with this data, you do not need to constantly return to the source. For example, you can import Seattle data and use a formula that contains information about the city's population. If it changes, the value in the cell will also change. Thus, the user sees not just a number, but knows where it came from.

Excel users have the ability to specify new data types

In addition, Microsoft is expanding cooperation with Wolfram Alpha so that users can access a preview of hundreds of types of external data. And additional intelligent templates will allow you to quickly start working with these types of data. Thanks to this, users will be able to enrich their analytics with useful information, for example, in chemistry, zip codes, nutrition, historical events and even genetics.

2019

Integration with Samsung Galaxy Note10

On August 8, 2019, the companies Microsoft Samsung and announced the development of a long-term strategic partnership in the field of innovation. Starting Samsung Galaxy Note10 with performance applications and services, Microsoft will are integrated be included in the products of the line, including the function of automatic synchronization with Link PERSONAL COMPUTER to,,,, Windows OneDrive as well as Outlook, and. Word Excel PowerPoint More. here

Excel has a real-time stock and currency rate

In early June 2019, Microsoft announced the start of a partnership with U.S. exchange Nasdaq and financial data providers Refinitiv to provide real-time stock and exchange rate data in Excel spreadsheets.

Now it will be more convenient for users to compile tables with financial data: they will be able to insert them immediately into the cells of the table and easily use them in formulas. Among other things, formulas can take into account parameters such as cost, 52-week minimum and maximum, change in value in numerical and percentage ratio, capitalization and other indices that are updated in real time.

Microsoft adds real-time stock and currency quotes to Excel

As part of the "Shares" expansion, Excel also provides updates to a wider range of data, including bitcoin exchange rates, bonds, foreign currency, information about the company's activities, mutual funds and other indices. Oliver Albers, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Partnership at Nasdaq, believes that easy access to financial information will allow users to respond more quickly to changes in their financial portfolio and make it easier for novice investors to enter the market.

Anyone interested in financial information needs fast and reliable data in order to navigate today's complex and rapidly changing global markets, says Brennan Carly, head of global at Refinitiv.

The feature is already available to all users of the Office 365 cloud service and the on-premises version of Excel. Microsoft claims "this is just the beginning." Users will soon have access to data from past months and to the automatic price update feature every few minutes. The company also published a training template and short instructions for working with the "Promotions" tool^[2]

2017: Added the function of joint editing of documents in real time

Microsoft Corporation on September 4, 2017 added the function of joint editing of documents in real time with Excel. This means that now several users can work with the same spreadsheet at once, and all changes will be automatically synchronized and added in real time. This feature is available for documents saved in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint.

According to the corporation, this was a big step towards making remote work as convenient and comfortable as working in the office shoulder to shoulder with colleagues. With shared editing in Excel, users can easily find out who else is working on the document and immediately respond to changes.

In addition to the co-editing feature in Excel, Microsoft announced support for auto-saving in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Office 365 subscribers who store documents on OneDrive and SharePoint. Previously, these features were only available to Office Insider members, but now all users can use them. Now, regardless of whether one person works with the document or several at the same time, all the latest changes are automatically saved to the cloud.

2011: Microsoft teaches Excel how to handle giant arrays of data

Microsoft developed technology to link Microsoft Excel to the massive computing capabilities of Windows Azure. The new project will lead to a revolution in the processing of large amounts of data, making access to such data publicly available, the company's researchers say. During D.C. TechFair 2011, which will be held June 15 in Washington, Microsoft is preparing to introduce technology for processing large amounts of data in the cloud Windows Azure directly from the Microsoft Excel interface. The new technology, known as Excel DataScope, was created by members cloud computing of the Cloud Research Engagement team as part of the eXtreme Computing Group research group.

From the end user's point of view, Excel DataScope is only an additional tape in the Microsoft Excel interface, but this tape provides access to resource-intensive processing functions that cannot be implemented at the level of an individual personal computer.

"Scientists talk about" big data "as a problem, but in fact it is an ideal opportunity for cloud computing," says Roger Barga, architect of the Cloud Research Engagement team. "Processing large datasets in the cloud is one of the most important technological shifts we have to see over the next few years."

Excel DataScope will allow researchers to load datasets into the cloud and perform analytical procedures such as finding patterns, identifying hidden associations, detecting similarities, and predicting time sequences. At the same time, the technical procedures related to the creation of virtual machines and the redundancy of computing power are completely hidden from the user who interacts only with the Microsoft Excel interface. Thus, researchers and analysts will be able to run resource-intensive analytical procedures that require the use of tens and even hundreds of processors.

1993: Integration into Microsoft Office

Having first merged into Microsoft Office in 1993, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint received a new graphical interface to match Excel, the main incentive for PC upgrades at that time.

Since 1993, Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic that allows you to automate Excel tasks. VBA is a powerful addition to the application and a fully functional integrated development environment is available in later versions of Excel. You can create VBA code that repeats user actions and thus automate simple tasks. VBA allows you to create forms to communicate with the user. The language supports the use (but not creation) of DLLs from ActiveX; later versions allow the use of object-oriented programming elements.

VBA functionality made Excel an easy target for macro viruses. And this was a serious problem until antivirus products learned to detect them. Microsoft, belatedly taking measures to reduce risk, added the possibility of choosing a security mode:

• disable macros completely
• enable macros when opening a document
• Trust all macros signed using trusted certificates.

Versions of Excel 5.0 to 9.0 contain various Easter eggs, although starting with version 10, Microsoft began to take measures to eliminate them.

1980s: Issue

In 1982, Microsoft launched the first Multiplan electronic table processor, which was very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it was inferior to Lotus 1-2-3. The first version of Excel was intended for Mac and was released in 1985, and the first version for Windows was released in November 1987. Lotus was slow to release the 1-2-3 under Windows, and Excel began bypassing the 1-2-3 sales since 1988, which ultimately helped Microsoft reach the positions of leading software developer. Microsoft strengthened its advantage with the release of each new version, which took place approximately every two years.

At the beginning of its journey, Excel caused a trademark lawsuit from another company that was already selling a package of programs called Excel. As a result of the dispute, Microsoft was required to use the name "Microsoft Excel" in all of its official press releases and legal documents. However, over time, this practice was forgotten, and Microsoft finally fixed the problem by acquiring the trademark of another program. Microsoft also decided to use the letters XL as an abbreviated name for the program: the Windows program icon consists of a stylized image of these two letters, and the default file extension in Excel is.xls. Compared to the first spreadsheet processors, Excel introduces many new user interface functions, but the essence remains the same: as in the parent program, VisiCalc, cells are arranged in rows and columns and can contain data or formulas with relative or absolute references to other cells.

Excel was the first table processor that allowed the user to change the appearance of the table (fonts, characters and the appearance of cells). He was also the first to introduce the method of smart cell recalculation, when only those cells that depend on the changed cells are updated (previously, table processors either constantly recalculated all cells or waited for the user's command).

Programming

A valuable feature of Excel is the ability to write code based on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This code is written using an editor separate from the tables. The spreadsheet is managed through an object-oriented code model and data. With this code, input table data will be instantly processed and displayed in tables and charts (graphs). The table becomes the interface of the code, making it easy to work and manage calculations.

Accuracy

Due to the fact that Excel works on the basis of floating point calculations, the statistical accuracy of Excel is criticized. Excel supporters say in response that these errors appear only in the special conditions of specially selected source data, which affect a relatively small number of users, and with a low probability they can meet in practice. For versions 97, 2000, 2002, errors were recorded when executing the MOD (division with remainder) function with certain arguments, where the function returns the# NUM! error instead of the result.

Mistakes

September 22, 2007 it was reported that in certain situations Excel 2007 will show incorrect results. In particular, for those pairs of numbers whose product is 65535 (for example, 850 and 77.1), Excel will display 100,000 as a total. This happens with about 14.5 % of these pairs. [14] In addition, if you add a unit to the result, Excel will output a total of 100001. However, if you subtract one from the total, the display displays the correct result 65534. (Also, if the total is multiplied or divided by 2, 131070 and 32767.5 will be displayed, respectively.)

Microsoft said in a Microsoft Excel blog post that the problem exists in displaying six specific floating point values between 65534, 99999999995 and 65535 and six values between 65535, 99999999995 and 65536 (excluding boundaries). Any calculations whose result is one of twelve values will not be displayed correctly. The actual data stored and transferred to other cells is correct, only the value mapping is incorrect. The error appeared in Excel 2007 and does not exist in previous versions. On October 9, 2007, Microsoft released a patch that fixes the issue. It also became part of the Service Pack 1 fixes.

Links

Microsoft Office Official Website

Notes