Editing Microsoft Excel (section)

== Impact ==
Excel offers many [[user interface]] tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet software, [[VisiCalc]]: the program displays cells organized in rows and columns, and each cell may contain data or a formula, with relative or absolute references to other cells.

Excel 2.0 for Windows, which was modeled after its Mac GUI-based counterpart, indirectly expanded the installed base of the then-nascent Windows environment. Excel 2.0 was released a month before Windows 2.0, and the installed base of Windows was so low at that point in 1987 that Microsoft had to bundle a runtime version of Windows 1.0 with Excel 2.0.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2005/11/20/happy-birthday-windows|title=Windows at 20: 20 things you didn't know about Windows 1.0|last1=Perton|first1=Marc|date=November 20, 2005|website=switched.com|access-date=August 1, 2013|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130411221828/http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2005/11/20/happy-birthday-windows|archive-date=April 11, 2013}}</ref> Unlike Microsoft Word, there never was a DOS version of Excel.

Excel became the first spreadsheet to allow the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes, and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell re-computation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are updated (previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command). Excel introduced auto-fill, the ability to drag and expand the selection box to automatically copy a cell or row contents to adjacent cells or rows, adjusting the copies intelligently by automatically incrementing cell references or contents. Excel also introduced extensive graphing capabilities.