• Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet application by Microsoft Corporation
• Excel (gum), a brand of chewing gum produced by Wrigley's
• Excel (band), a band from Venice, California
• Excel (Excel Saga), the protagonist in the manga and anime series Excel Saga
• Excel, Alabama, a town in the United States
• ExCeL Exhibition Centre in London, England
• EXCEL High School, a public secondary school in Oakland, California, USA

Vehicles

• Hyundai Excel, a sedan and hatchback by Hyundai
• Lotus Excel, a sports car by Lotus Cars
• Optare Excel, a single-deck bus

Companies

• Excel Airways
• Excel Communications, a telephone company in Irving, Texas
• Excel Records, a record label

See also

• XL
• Edexcel

The ExCeL Exhibition Centre is a large purpose-built exhibition centre in the Royal Docks area of London's redeveloped Docklands. The centre was built by Sir Robert McAlpine: it opened in November 2000, and its name is a contraction of Exhibition Centre London.

ExCeL's site covers over 100 acres (400,000 m²) on the north quayside of the Royal Victoria Dock. Whilst this dock closed to commercial traffic in 1981, it is still accessible to shipping. The centre's waterfront location is used to advantage when it hosts the annual London Boat Show, with visiting vessels able to moor alongside the exhibition centre; for example the 2005 show was visited by HMS Sutherland. The exhibition building itself consists of two column-free rectangular halls of 32,250 m² each on either side of a central boulevard containing catering facilities and information points. The halls can be subdivided for smaller events. There are also three sets of function rooms, one overlooking the water, another above the western end of the central boulevard, and the third on the north side of the building. A temporary hall can be added on part of the car park when required. There are several on-site hotels, including a permanently moored cruise liner.

Transport links

ExCeL is served by two railway stations. The main western entrance is directly linked to Custom House station and the eastern entrance is connected to Prince Regent station, both of which are served by the Docklands Light Railway. During major shows with large visitor attendances, extra shuttle trains are run between Prince Regent station and Canning Town station, with interchange at Canning Town to London Underground's Jubilee Line.

ExCeL is located near London City Airport. A number of dual-carriageway roads connect the centre to the airport and the important nearby office and commercial district of Canary Wharf.

Sport

For the 2012 Summer Olympics ExCeL will be divided into four sports halls with capacities ranging from 6,000 to 10,000, which will be used for boxing, fencing, judo, taekwondo, table tennis, weightlifting and wrestling.

Other events

ExCel played host to the 2007 London Guitar Show between Friday 27th - Sunday 29th April. The show featured 2 masterclasses on the Saturday with Steve Vai, in which time he answered questions asked by fans through the LGS website prior to the show, and from fans at the masterclass.

In 2007, ExCel hosted the Star Wars Celebration Europe; the first Star Wars fan event of its kind outside the United States, between 13th-15th July 2007.

Since 2006, Excel has been the venue for the British Motor Show. The ExCel centre has hosted the biannual UK arms fair DSEi since 2001, most recently on 11-14 September 2007.

ExCeL also plays host to the London MCM Expo for comic, anime, manga and sci-fi fans every May and October with different guests each time.

The Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards 2007 was held there in October 2007 which was the first time in the United Kingdom.

ExCeL was the Permanence - the operational and media headquarters - for the Grand Départ of the Tour de France in 2007.

On 26 April 2008 the arena hosted the Bollywood cutural event, the Zee Cine Awards 2008 for the second time in the event's history, the previous one being in 2005

On 27 May 2008 the arena hosted one of the biggest events in Ahmadi history, the Khalifat Centenary.

References

External links

• Ahmadiyya Muslim Caliphate Centenary Celebrations at ExCel Exhibition Centre - CNN Video
• Official Venue Website
• ExCel Location Google Satellite view of ExCel London

In computing, Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel) consists of a proprietary spreadsheet-application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and, except for Excel 2008 for Mac OS X, a macro programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms and has been so since version 5 in 1993, and is bundled as part of Microsoft Office.

History

Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which became very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. Redmond released the first version of Excel for the Mac in 1985, and the first Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) in November 1987. Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by 1988 Excel had started to outsell 1-2-3 and helped Microsoft achieve the position of leading PC software developer. This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing GUI software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 12, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2008.

Early in 1993, Excel became the target of a trademark lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named "Excel" in the finance industry. As the result of the dispute Microsoft was required to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel" in all of its formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time this practice has been ignored, and Microsoft cleared up the issue permanently when they purchased the trademark of the other program. Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program; while this is no longer common, the program's icon on Windows still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is .xls.

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

Excel was the first spreadsheet that allowed the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, 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 has extensive graphing capabilities, and enables users to perform mail merge.

When Microsoft first bundled Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint into Microsoft Office in 1993, those applications had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel, the killer app on the PC at the time.

Since 1993, Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic which adds the ability to automate tasks in Excel and to provide user defined functions (UDF) for use in worksheets. VBA is a powerful addition to the application which, in later versions, includes a fully featured integrated development environment (IDE). Macro recording can produce VBA code replicating user actions, thus allowing simple automation of regular tasks. VBA allows the creation of forms and in-worksheet controls to communicate with the user. The language supports use (but not creation) of ActiveX (COM) DLL's; later versions add support for class modules allowing the use of basic object-oriented programming techniques.

The automation functionality provided by VBA has caused Excel to become a target for macro viruses. This was a serious problem in the corporate world until antivirus products began to detect these viruses. Microsoft belatedly took steps to prevent the misuse by adding the ability to disable macros completely, to enable macros when opening a workbook or to trust all macros signed using a trusted certificate.

Versions 5.0 to 9.0 of Excel contain various Easter eggs, although since version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented features from their products.

Versions

Versions for Microsoft Windows include:

• 1987 Excel 2.0 for Windows
• 1990 Excel 3.0
• 1992 Excel 4.0
• 1993 Excel 5.0 (Office 4.2 & 4.3, also a 32-bit version for Windows NT only on the PowerPC, DEC Alpha, and MIPS)
• 1995 Excel for Windows 95 (version 7.0) - included in Office 95
• 1997 Excel 97 - included in Office 97 (x86 and also a DEC Alpha version)
• 1999 Excel 2000 (version 9.0) included in Office 2000
• 2001 Excel 2002 (version 10) included in Office XP
• 2003 Excel 2003 (version 11) included in Office 2003
• 2007 Excel 2007 (version 12) included in Office 2007
• Notice: There is no Excel 1.0, in order to avoid confusion with Apple versions.
• Notice: There is no Excel 6.0, because the Windows 95 version was launched with Word 7. All the Office 95 & Office 4.X products have OLE 2 capacity - moving data automatically from various programs - and Excel 7 should show that it was contemporary with Word 7.

Versions for the Apple Macintosh include:

• 1985 Excel 1.0
• 1988 Excel 1.5
• 1989 Excel 2.2
• 1990 Excel 3.0
• 1992 Excel 4.0
• 1993 Excel 5.0 (Office 4.X -- Motorola 68000 version and first PowerPC version)
• 1998 Excel 8.0 (Office '98)
• 2000 Excel 9.0 (Office 2001)
• 2001 Excel 10.0 (Office v. X)
• 2004 Excel 11.0 (part of Office 2004 for Mac)
• 2008 Excel 12.0 (part of Office 2008 for Mac)

Versions for OS/2 include:

• 1989 Excel 2.2
• 1990 Excel 2.3
• 1991 Excel 3.0

Versions of Excel up to 7.0 had a limitation in the size of their data sets of 16K (2^14) rows. Versions 8.0 through 11.0 could handle 64K (2^16) rows and 256 columns (2^8 as label 'IV'). Version 12.0 can handle 1M (2^20=1048576) rows, and 16384 (2^14 as label 'XFD') columns.

File formats

Microsoft Excel up until 2007 version used a proprietary binary file format called Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) as its primary format. Excel 2007 uses Office Open XML as its primary file format, an XML-based format that followed after a previous XML-based format called "XML Spreadsheet" ("XMLSS"), first introduced in Excel 2002. The latter format is not able to encode VBA macros.

Although supporting and encouraging the use of new XML-based formats as replacements, Excel 2007 remained backwards-compatible with the traditional, binary formats. In addition, most versions of Microsoft Excel can read CSV, DBF, SYLK, DIF, and other legacy formats.

Binary

Standard file-extensions

• spreadsheet: .xls
• add-in macro sheet: .xla
• toolbar: .xlb
• chart: .xlc
• dialog: .xld
• archive: .xlk
• dynamic link library: .xll
• macro: .xlm
• template: .xlt
• module; .xlv
• workbook: .xlw

Office Open XML

Microsoft Excel 2007, along with the other products in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, introduces a host of new file formats. These form part of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification.

The new Excel 2007 formats are:

Export and migration of spreadsheets

Programming

The most common and easiest way to generate VBA code is by use of the macro recorder function that faithfully writes the code for the actions that the user carries out with mouse/keyboard. There is a relative/absolute toggle button that allows the user to switch between the two whilst recording a macro. Relative/absolute in this context means the relative to the start cell location or an absolute cell reference for example cell A1 (column A, row 1).

Certain features such as loop functions and screen prompts by their own properties cannot be recorded, but must be entered into the VBA module directly by the programmer.

The macros can easily be activated using a button using the form menu, and advanced users can use user prompts to create an interactive program.

Although conceptually simple to understand (especially using a macro recorder), the combination of multiple steps under many different constraints/conditions requires a robust testing/quality control processes to gain regular/reliable/predictable results for the product to realise its benefits.

Software errors

Accuracy

Excel MOD function error

Date problems

Excel 2007 display error

On September 22, 2007 it was reported that Excel 2007 will show incorrect results in certain situations. Specifically, for some pairs of numbers with a product of 65,535 (such as 850 and 77.1), Excel will display their product as 100,000. This occurs with about 14.5% of such pairs. In addition, adding to this result gives 100,001, but subtracting one from the original product produces the correct result of 65,534.

Microsoft has reported on the Microsoft Excel Blog that the problem exists in the display of six specific floating point values between 65534.99999999995 and 65,535, and six values between 65535.99999999995 and 65,536 (not including the integers). Any calculation that results in one of these twelve values will display incorrectly. The actual value stored and passed to other cells is correct, only the displayed value is wrong. The error was introduced with changes made to the Excel display logic for the 2007 version, and does not exist in previous versions. On October 9, 2007, Microsoft released a fix to the public. This issue is also corrected with Service Pack 1.

Chris Lomont presented a detailed explanation of the bug, how it was likely caused by changing 16-bit formatting code to 32-bit code, why it only affects 12 values and then only while formatting, and how the hotfix corrects the bug.

See also

• Comparison of spreadsheets
• List of spreadsheets
• Visual Basic for Applications

References

Further reading

• E. Joseph Billo (2007). EXCEL for Scientists and Engineers. New York: Wiley Interscience.
• David M. Bourg (2006). Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook. Second Edition, Sebastopol CA: O'Reilly.
• Robert de Levie (2004). Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis. New York: Oxford.
• Steven Roman (2002). Writing Excel Macros with VBA. Second Edition, Sebastopol CA: O'Reilly.
• Michael Kofler (2003). Definitive Guide to Excel VBA. Second Edition, Berkeley CA: Apress.

External links

• Microsoft Excel official site
• Microsoft Excel 2007 tutorial videos
• A variety of links offering mainly free Excel Help by Microsoft recognized Most Valued Professionals