Introduction to Microsoft Excel

Excel is software program manufactured by Microsoft which is used for spreadsheets to manage numbers and data with formulas and functions. Excel analysis is being used vastly by businesses of all types to perform financial analysis.  The program was manufactured for Windows, Android, IOS, macOS

First version of MSC Excel was invented on 30 September 1985 by Microsoft for Macintosh system. However, first Windows version i.e 2.05 (which synchronized with Macintosh version 2.2) was released on November 1987. Afterwards much experiment were done to produce better results from Excel and in early 1990s Microsoft achieved to get its position as leading computer software developer. Since, Microsoft preserved its status with regular new releases after every two years or so. So far, approximate 12x versions of MS Excel have been released with latest version of MS Excel 16.0.

MS Excel has basic features of all spreadsheets using grid of cells which are arranged in numbered rows and letter-named columns to organize data manipulations and other calculative operations. The program has bank of supported functions to answer financial statistical, engineering and other requirements. The programs allocates sectioning of data to view its dependencies on various factors for different perspectives (using pivot tables and the scenario manager).

Excel is specially used to manage data and financial analysis.  The program is friendly and being used across all business at companies. Main purposes of excel are data entry, data management, accounting, financial analysis, charting and graphing, programming, time management, task management, financial modeling, customer relationship management, and almost anything that needs to be organized.

The program contains many functions, formulas, and shortcuts which are used to enhance its functionality. The software is being used broadly in finance and accounting matters.  Many organizations program their entire budgeting, forecasting, and accounting maters through Excel spreadsheets. While the Excel is described as a “data” management tool, the data that is most commonly managed is financial.

There are many data management softwares; out of which MS Excel is  the most feasible and easy to use. Moreover, the MS Excel can also be linked with other data softwares easily therefore, accountants, analysts, bankers and people of financial career paths exert on excel in order for easiness of their daily job tasks. The program can be used friendly both with mouse and keyboard.

MS Excel also provides facilitation in analysis through charts, graphs, or histograms created from specified group of cells. The graphs can either be placed within current sheet or added as a separate object.

Up to version MS Excel 7.0 it had limitation of their data sets of 16K (214 = 16384) rows. 64K (216 = 65536) rows and 256 columns (28 as label 'IV') could be handled by versions 8.0 through 11.0. However, in latest versions, over 1M (220 = 1048576) rows, and 16384 (214 as label 'XFD') columns can be handled.

MS Excel has access for external data sources via Microsoft Office features like .odc connections built with the Office Data Connection file format. Excel files themselves may be updated using a Microsoft supplied ODBC driver.

MS excel has also been provided with feasible security features like passwords in different manners i.e Password to open a document, to modify a document, to unprotect worksheet, to protect workbook and to protect the sharing workbook.