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50 free Microsoft Excel trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Excel trivia for accountants, analysts, teachers and anyone who has ever lost an afternoon to a VLOOKUP. The quiz traces the spreadsheet's story from VisiCalc on the Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC, through Excel's 1985 launch alongside Steve Jobs, the first Windows version that had to ship with its own copy of Windows, the arrival of VBA and PivotTables, the Ribbon, and the modern era of dynamic arrays, LAMBDA and Python. There is plenty of fun in between: the hidden flight simulator and Doom clone, the dancing 1-2-3 Easter egg, the fake 29 February 1900, the 'VelvetSweatshop' password, skipped version numbers, row and column limits, the paperclip's real name and the day Excel became an esport. Difficulty runs from easy questions any office worker can answer to expert questions for the people who know what XFD means. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was the first version of Excel released?
1985
It came out for the Mac on September 30, 1985; Windows users had to wait until late 1987.
Q 02Excel 1.0 was released for which platform?
Apple Macintosh
Bill Gates redirected the project to the Mac in March 1984, which delayed it by nine months.
Q 03What was Excel's codename while in development from 1983?
Odyssey
It was designed to rescue Microsoft's spreadsheet business after its first product lost the DOS market to Lotus.
Q 04Microsoft's first spreadsheet, launched in 1982 for CP/M, was called what?
Multiplan
It ran on everything from the Commodore 64 to the TI-99/4A but never dented Lotus's grip on the PC.
Q 05Which program was the dominant PC spreadsheet by 1983 and Excel's great rival for a decade?
Lotus 1-2-3
Its name promised spreadsheet, database and charts in one, though the database part was debatable.
Q 06What was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, released in 1979?
VisiCalc
It sold up to a million copies and is credited with prompting IBM to build the IBM PC.
Q 07The first spreadsheet program was written for which home computer?
Apple II
It became the machine's 'killer app', turning a hobbyist computer into a business tool.
Q 08Bill Gates announced Excel in May 1985 at a joint New York press conference with which tech leader?
Steve Jobs
Relations soured later, but in 1985 Microsoft was one of the Mac's most important software partners.
Q 09That 1985 launch press conference was held at which Central Park restaurant?
Tavern on the Green
The software itself did not go on sale until the end of September.
Q 10The first Windows release of Excel in 1987 was numbered what, to line up with the Mac version?
2.0
There was never a 1.0 for Windows - or any DOS version at all.
Q 11Because Microsoft's graphical environment had so few users in 1987, the first PC Excel shipped bundled with what?
A cut-down runtime of Windows
It came out a month before Windows 2.0 and helped grow the Windows installed base.
Q 12Unlike Word, Excel never had a version for which operating system?
MS-DOS
There were OS/2 releases in 1989-1991, but the PC always required a graphical environment.
Q 13Excel 95 was version 7.0 and Excel 2010 was version 14.0. Which two version numbers were skipped?
6 and 13
The first jump synchronised all Office apps on one number; the second is usually put down to superstition.
Q 21Since Excel 2007, what is the label of the far-right column in a worksheet?
XFD
Before 2007 the last of 256 columns was labelled IV.
Q 22Before Excel 2007, a worksheet was capped at how many rows?
65,536
That 2-to-the-16th limit is why old .xls exports silently truncate large datasets.
Q 23The .xlsx format introduced in 2007 is defined by which standard?
Office Open XML
Macro-enabled workbooks use .xlsm instead, and the old binary .xls format is still readable.
Q 24The 2020 addition of the LAMBDA function gave Excel's formula language which computer-science property?
Q 14Which version introduced Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)?
Excel 5.0
Before that, macros lived in cells of special macro sheets with the .XLM extension.
Q 15Excel 4.0's Easter egg shows the Excel logo crushing which dancing digits?
1, 2 and 3
It was a not-so-subtle jab at the rival spreadsheet Excel was overtaking at the time.
Q 16What was the name of the Doom-like mini-game hidden inside Excel 95?
The Hall of Tortured Souls
Its rooms featured the names and faces of the developers.
Q 17What kind of game was hidden as an Easter egg in Excel 97?
A flight simulator
Microsoft stamped out such undocumented features from version 10 onwards.
Q 18Excel 2000's hidden 3-D driving game was inspired by which arcade classic?
Spy Hunter
It was one of the last Excel Easter eggs before Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing push ended them.
Q 19Which version replaced menus and toolbars with the Ribbon?
Excel 2007
Surveys found most users disliked the change at first, advanced users most of all.
Q 20Since Excel 2007, how many rows can a single worksheet hold?
1,048,576
That is 2 to the power of 20; the column limit rose to 16,384 at the same time.
Turing completeness
It means any computation can, in principle, be expressed purely in formulas without VBA.
Q 25How many built-in functions did Excel 2016 have?
484
Microsoft sorts them into 14 categories, and 360 of them predate Excel 2010.
Q 26Which non-existent date does Excel treat as real, for compatibility with an older rival program?
29 February 1900
Lotus 1-2-3 deliberately faked the leap year to save memory, and Excel copied the bug on purpose.
Q 27The 1900 leap-year bug was deliberately copied into Excel for compatibility with which program?
Lotus 1-2-3
The quirk has since been carried into the Office Open XML file format itself.
Q 28A workbook locked with the 'Protect Workbook' password is encrypted with which default key?
VelvetSweatshop
Because everyone knows it, that particular protection adds no real security.
Q 29Excel 2007 switched password-to-open encryption to which algorithm?
AES
Combined with 50,000 rounds of SHA-1, it cut brute-force attacks to hundreds of guesses per second.
Q 30Excel became an esport in 2020 with the launch of which competition?
Financial Modeling World Cup
Games such as Tetris, 2048 and Civilization have also been recreated inside spreadsheets.