96 Fun Facts About Microsoft Excel

Which bank's 2012 London Whale loss was partly blamed on Excel?

JPMorgan Chase's risk model ran on Excel sheets completed by copying and pasting, and one formula divided by a sum instead of an average, lowering the risk it showed.

In an Excel formula, what do the dollar signs in $A$1 do?

Keep it fixed when copied: copy =B4*C4 down one row and it becomes =B5*C5, but =$B$4*$C$4 stays exactly the same.

Behind the scenes, how does Excel store a date such as 1 July 2025?

As a number: Excel counts days from a fixed starting date, so adding 10 to a date moves it ten days later.

Microsoft's first spreadsheet, launched in 1982 for CP/M, was called what?

Multiplan lost the DOS market to a rival, so Bill Gates chose to leave text-based DOS software behind and bet on graphical programs for the Mac and Windows.

Which Excel tool works backward, adjusting one input until a formula returns the result you want?

Goal Seek runs the sum in reverse: tell it the monthly loan payment you can afford, and it finds the interest rate that produces it.

What was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, released in 1979?

VisiCalc was co-written by a Harvard Business School student, and it is credited with turning personal computers into serious business tools.

The first personal-computer spreadsheet was written for which home computer?

Apple II: for its first year the program ran on nothing else, so buyers who wanted the $100 software added a $2,000 computer to the order.

Excel launched first on the Macintosh, so which tech leader joined Bill Gates to unveil it in 1985?

Steve Jobs shared the stage with Bill Gates, but later that year he lost a boardroom power struggle, left and founded NeXT.

Microsoft announced Excel in 1985 at which Central Park restaurant?

Tavern on the Green was built in 1870 as a sheepfold for the flock grazing Central Park's Sheep Meadow, and became a restaurant when the sheep left in 1934.

Which key makes Excel recalculate every formula in all open workbooks?

F9 is how you update formulas after switching Excel to Manual calculation, a mode that stops it recalculating after every edit.

When Excel reached PCs in 1987, what came in the box?

A cut-down runtime of Windows came in the box, and shipping it with Excel helped put Windows itself onto more PCs.

Which Excel function counts how many times a particular city appears in a customer list?

COUNTIF checks a single condition, so =COUNTIF(B:B,"Paris") tallies every Paris in column B, and COUNTIFS handles several conditions at once.

Microsoft's first Office suite bundled Excel and Word with which program?

PowerPoint wasn't built by Microsoft: it bought the program's maker, Forethought, for $14 million in 1987.

Which software company launched Quattro Pro, an early rival to Excel?

Borland beat a lawsuit over copying a rival's menus, yet it had already sold Quattro Pro to Novell by the time the case ended.

Which command on Excel's View tab keeps chosen rows or columns in sight while you scroll?

Freeze Panes locks rows or columns in place, so a big table's header row stays on screen while you scroll, until Unfreeze Panes releases it.

What was the name of the Doom-like mini-game hidden inside Excel 95?

The Hall of Tortured Souls hid photos of Excel's developers, which you could only reach by typing a secret word, excelkfa.

What kind of game was hidden as an Easter egg in Excel 97?

A flight simulator was one of the last big Excel eggs: from Excel 2002 on, Microsoft stripped such undocumented extras out of the product.

Excel 2000's hidden 3-D driving game was inspired by which arcade classic?

It was one of the last Excel Easter eggs before Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing push ended them.

Which interface did Excel 2007 bring in to replace its old menus and toolbars?

The Ribbon's design was patented, and in 2018 a US jury found that Corel had infringed Microsoft's interface patents.

Since Excel 2007, how many rows can a single worksheet hold?

1,048,576 rows is 2 to the 20th power, and opening a bigger CSV file brings a warning that saving will lose the rows that didn't load.

Since Excel 2007, what is the label of the far-right column in a worksheet?

XFD came with Excel 2007's switch from the old .xls format to .xlsx, which lifted the old limits on how big a sheet could be.

Whose Excel file lost nearly 16,000 COVID results?

Public Health England loaded lab results into old .xls templates, and once a file was full the extra results were simply left out.

The .xlsx format introduced in 2007 is defined by which standard?

Office Open XML files are zipped bundles of XML, so renaming an .xlsx file to .zip lets you open it up and read the parts inside.

The 2020 addition of the LAMBDA function gave Excel's formula language which computer-science property?

Turing completeness came because a LAMBDA function can call itself, so formulas alone can repeat a calculation that once needed a script.

Which Excel function did Microsoft announce as the successor to VLOOKUP?

XLOOKUP can return values from either side of the lookup column, while VLOOKUP can only look to the right.

Which non-existent date does Excel treat as real, for compatibility with an older rival program?

29 February 1900 is a bug copied from an older rival, and Excel keeps it because fixing it would shift the dates in files shared between programs.

Which program was the dominant PC spreadsheet by 1983 and Excel's chief rival through the 1980s?

Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the 1980s, but it was slow to reach Windows, and by the early 1990s Excel was outselling it.

Which error does Excel show when other data blocks the cells a dynamic array formula needs?

#SPILL! means something is in the way: clear the blocking cells and the formula fills the range by itself.

Excel 2007 switched password-to-open encryption to which algorithm?

AES replaced the weak 40-bit RC4 of Office 97 to 2003, and Excel 2007 also ran the password through SHA-1 50,000 times to slow down guessing.

Excel became an esport in 2020 with the launch of which competition?

Games such as Tetris, 2048 and Civilization have also been recreated inside spreadsheets.

Microsoft's earlier spreadsheet used which cell-addressing style, still available in Excel as an option?

In it, 'RC[-1]' means 'this row, previous column' - the same in every cell, unlike A1-style.

Which data-visualization pioneer coined the name of Excel 2010's in-cell sparklines?

Edward Tufte meant sparklines to be word-sized, so data could sit inside a sentence, table or headline instead of in a separate chart.

Which Excel feature can split full names into first names after you type just one example?

Flash Fill arrived in Excel 2013 and learns from your example, so it can also join first and last names from two columns into one.

Dynamic array formulas made which old keyboard shortcut for entering array formulas unnecessary?

Ctrl+Shift+Enter still works in older workbooks, but Microsoft says new array formulas no longer need it: they simply fill the cells beside them.

In 2023, Microsoft announced that Excel would run code in which programming language inside its grid?

Python in Excel sends the code to Microsoft's cloud through a new PY function, so users don't have to install anything on their own PCs.

Which Excel tool summarizes a table by dragging fields into rows and values?

PivotTable traces back to Pito Salas, who conceived the pivot table while designing a rival's next spreadsheet.

Which spreadsheet pioneer co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990?

Mitchell Kapor co-founded the EFF with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, forming it in response to US Secret Service raids.

Which element, just left of Excel's formula bar, shows the address of the selected cell?

The Name Box also names cells: select a range, type a name into the box and press Enter, and formulas can then use that name.

The paperclip Office Assistant that arrived with Excel 97 was officially named what?

Clippit was the default Office Assistant, and Microsoft later removed the whole feature: no Office release since 2007 has included it.

Which feature was dropped from Mac Excel 2008 and restored in Mac Excel 2011?

VBA macros were cut because Microsoft said moving them over to its new Mac tools would have added roughly two years of development.

Which time-saving feature - dragging a selection to copy and increment cells - debuted in Excel 4.0?

Auto-fill recognizes common series, so dragging a single 'Monday' down a column fills in the days of the week that follow.

Which bundled Excel add-in provides tools for optimization?

Solver can change many input cells together, which is why Excel's one-input what-if tool points bigger problems to this add-in instead.

The 2010 paper 'Growth in a Time of Debt', later undercut by a spreadsheet error, was widely cited to support what?

Austerity backers such as Paul Ryan quoted the paper, and a University of Massachusetts student checking it for homework later found the spreadsheet mistakes.

In Excel, what becomes of a typed number's 16th digit?

A zero replaces it, because Excel keeps only 15 significant digits, so long card or account numbers need to be entered as text.

In 2020, scientists renamed some of what because Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates?

Human genes were renamed first, and Microsoft later added a setting that stops Excel converting strings of letters and numbers into dates.

Which Excel feature adds drop-down arrows to column headings so you can show only rows that match?

Filter only hides the rows that don't match, so nothing is deleted, and clearing the filter brings every row back.

Which rarely used key makes Excel's arrow keys slide the whole sheet rather than move between cells?

Scroll Lock catches people out when the arrow keys suddenly stop moving the selection. On keyboards that lack the key, the Windows on-screen keyboard has a ScrLk button that switches it off.

A 1979 spreadsheet is often called the first example of which nickname for software that sells the computer?

Killer app was coined in the late 1980s and applied in hindsight. Buyers had paid $100 for the spreadsheet, then thousands of dollars for the one computer that could run it.

What does Excel fill a cell with when the column is too narrow to display a number or date?

Hash signs fill the cell until you widen the column, and they also appear when a date or time calculation comes out negative.

Excel translates its function names, so in which language's edition is AVERAGE typed as MOYENNE?

French editions of Excel rename nearly every function: MOYENNE is simply the everyday word for an average, and TODAY becomes AUJOURDHUI.

Before computers, the term spread sheet meant a ruled grid of rows and columns used in which profession?

Accounting used the term by at least 1906, when a hospital conference report described a spread sheet showing every item of expenditure, prepared each month for the superintendent.

The Microsoft Excel World Championship has staged its in-person finals in which American city?

Las Vegas hosted the December 2024 final in front of 400 spectators, where Michael Jarman unseated three-time champion Andrew Ngai, known as the Annihilator.

Which typeface replaced Arial as Excel's default font in Office 2007?

Calibri stayed Excel's default until Microsoft swapped it for Aptos, a typeface it commissioned for the job and announced in July 2023.

Which ancient people were already storing data in tables on clay tablets around 1800 BCE?

Babylonians are among the earliest examples given of data kept in rows and columns; book-keeping ledgers and astronomical records later used the same kind of grid.

In CSV, the plain-text format nearly every spreadsheet program can open, what does the C stand for?

Comma-separated values files hold one record per line with a comma between the fields, and the name was already in use by 1983.

Which Excel chart type shows parts of a whole like a pie chart but can hold more than one data series?

Doughnut charts draw each data series as its own ring, though Microsoft itself warns that they are not easy to read.

Which character must be typed first in an Excel cell for the entry to be treated as a formula?

Equals sign first, then the calculation: without it, typing 5*3 leaves those three characters sitting in the cell instead of the result, 15.

Which Excel command combines two or more selected boxes into one larger box, often to hold a heading?

Merge Cells keeps only what was in the upper-left cell of the selection, and anything typed in the other cells is deleted.

In an Excel chart, what is the name of the box showing which colour or pattern stands for each data series?

Legend boxes are generated automatically whenever Excel creates a chart, and one that has been deleted by hand can be brought back.

What does Excel call the one selected box, outlined by a heavy border, where your typing will appear?

Active cell is the term, and only one cell can hold that status at a time, however many others are highlighted around it.

Which punctuation mark goes between the first and last cell when you type a range into an Excel formula?

Colon is Excel's range operator, so B5 and B15 joined by one means every cell from the first to the last, both ends included.

Which Excel command makes a long entry break onto several lines inside one cell rather than overflow?

Wrap Text sits on the Home tab, and the lines re-flow by themselves whenever the column is made wider or narrower.

Which Excel function returns one result when a test is true and a different result when it is false?

IF is one of the most popular functions in Excel, and several can be nested inside one another to run a chain of comparisons.

Which Excel chart type, also called an XY chart, plots pairs of numeric values as points on two value axes?

Scatter charts are typically used for scientific, statistical and engineering data, and they look much like line charts once the points are joined up.

Which Excel tool on the Home tab copies one cell's fonts, colours and borders onto other cells?

Format Painter is shown as a paintbrush: select a cell you like the look of, click the brush, then drag across the cells that should match.

Which Excel function returns the middle value of a set of numbers once they are placed in order?

MEDIAN copes with an even count too: given 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 it returns 3.5, the midway point between the third and fourth numbers.

Which Excel function, entered with empty brackets, returns both the current date and the time of day?

NOW does not tick like a clock: its value changes only when the sheet is recalculated, so a printout shows the moment of the last calculation.

In an Excel formula, which symbol joins two pieces of text together into a single string?

Ampersand is Excel's one text operator: Microsoft's own example places it between North and wind to produce Northwind.

Which symbol raises a number to a power in an Excel formula, turning 2 and 3 into 8?

Caret marks exponentiation, and Excel works it out before any multiplying or dividing that appears in the same formula.

What does Excel call the error that arises when a formula refers back to its own cell?

Circular reference warnings can be silenced on purpose: with iterative calculation switched on, Excel lets the formula loop a set number of times.

Which Paste Special option in Excel flips copied data so that the rows become columns?

Transpose is not offered for data sitting inside an Excel table, which has to be converted to an ordinary range first.

Which Excel feature limits what can be typed into a cell, for example to the items in a drop-down list?

Data Validation can also hold a percentage under a ceiling or refuse dates before today, and it shows a warning when an entry breaks the rule.

Which Excel function counts how many characters a cell contains, with every space included?

LEN reports the length of a text string, and because spaces count as characters it helps expose invisible ones lurking after a word.

Which Excel function strips surplus spaces from text, leaving only single spaces between the words?

TRIM was designed for the ordinary 7-bit space character, so the non-breaking spaces common in text copied from web pages survive it.

Which Excel function turns john smith into John Smith by capitalising the first letter of every word?

PROPER also capitalises any letter that follows a character other than a letter, so 2-way street comes out as 2-Way Street.

Which function does Excel insert when you press Alt together with the = key beneath a column of numbers?

SUM arrives ready-made: the shortcut is the keyboard twin of the AutoSum button on the Home tab, which writes the whole formula for you.

Which Harvard student conceived the first PC spreadsheet after watching a professor rework a blackboard table?

Dan Bricklin is often called the father of the spreadsheet. He built the program with Bob Frankston, and the pair founded Software Arts in 1979.

Which three-letter extension did Excel files carry by default before the 2007 version brought in a new one?

Files ending .xls used a proprietary binary layout, and Excel 2007 stayed backwards-compatible with it even while pushing its replacement.

In an Excel formula, which function key cycles a cell address through its relative and absolute forms?

F4 has a second job: when no cell address is selected in a formula, pressing it repeats your last command or action.

Which Excel wizard on the Data tab splits one cell's contents wherever a chosen separator appears?

Text to Columns shows a preview of the result before it commits, handy for a list of full names that needs separate first and last names.

Which error value appears in Excel when a formula points to a cell that has since been deleted?

#REF! flags a formula aimed at cells that no longer exist, and pressing Ctrl+Z straight after the deletion brings them back.

Calc is the name of the spreadsheet program in which office suite?

LibreOffice split away from the older OpenOffice.org project in 2010, and Calc runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD.

Which Excel chart type shows a running total stepping up and down as values are added or subtracted?

Waterfall charts are also called bridge charts, because the in-between values hang as floating columns between the first figure and the last.

Apple's spreadsheet app Numbers belongs to which productivity suite, alongside Pages and Keynote?

iWork's spreadsheet breaks with the usual endless grid: it starts from a free-form canvas on which tables are just one kind of object.

Which line added to an Excel chart shows the general direction of a data series, such as rising sales?

Trendline analysis is also known as regression analysis, and it is used to study problems of prediction, such as where sales are heading.

Which Excel function works out a loan's regular repayment from its interest rate, term and amount borrowed?

PMT covers only principal and interest, so any taxes, reserve payments or fees attached to a loan are left out of its result.

Which developer led Microsoft's work on Word and Excel before twice flying to space as a tourist?

Charles Simonyi paid his own way to the International Space Station in 2007 and again in 2009, the first space tourist to go back for a second trip.

Which former Excel program manager went on to create Trello and co-found the coding Q&A site Stack Overflow?

Joel Spolsky joined the Excel team in 1991 and designed Excel Basic there, years before his blog Joel on Software made him a familiar name to programmers.

Google Sheets can be automated with Apps Script, a scripting platform built on which programming language?

JavaScript in Apps Script ran on an ageing interpreter until Google switched to the modern V8 engine in 2020. The tool began as one Sheets developer's side project.

Which Excel tool for importing and cleaning data is built on a formula language known simply as M?

Power Query takes its M from mashup, because its queries mix data from different sources. Excel 2016 briefly renamed the tool Get & Transform.

Which Excel function counts the working days between two dates, leaving out weekends and listed holidays?

NETWORKDAYS was built for tasks such as calculating employee benefits that accrue with each day worked during a set term.

Which Excel auditing command draws arrows from a selected formula back to every cell that feeds into it?

Trace Precedents has a mirror-image command for the opposite direction, which points its arrows at every formula relying on the selected cell.

Which Excel What-If tool stores several named sets of input values, such as a best case and a worst case?

Scenario Manager can keep both budgets on the same worksheet and swap between them, changing the result cells each time you switch.

Which single function key instantly turns selected Excel data into a chart on a new sheet of its own?

F11 builds the chart on a separate chart sheet, while Alt+F1 drops the same chart straight onto the worksheet you are looking at.

On an Excel column chart, what is the official name for the horizontal line of text labels such as Qtr1?

Category axis labels are arbitrary pieces of text, so unlike the scale running up the side it cannot display scaled numerical values.

Which character, typed before a number in an Excel cell, stops entries such as 1/47 turning into dates?

Apostrophe first and Excel keeps the entry exactly as typed, while the mark itself disappears from the cell once you press Enter.