History of Microsoft Office Excel

A review of the evolution of the Microsoft Office software interface.

This article traces the development and improvement of the MS Office interface and reveals some of the reasons why a new user interface was introduced in Office 2007. This article is written on the basis of a series of articles by Jensen Harris, and also refers to the help knowledge of the office system, most of the screenshots are directly taken from the original text, and the link to the reference article is attached.

Jensen Harris is the Head of Programming at the MS Office UI development team and has been with Microsoft for nearly eight years. He started his 5 years working on Outlook mail and PIM design programs, after which he led the team to redesign the Outlook 2003 user interface released in Office 2003. After completing Office 2003, I came to work in the Office User Experience team.

The source of the Office interface.

Microsoft developed Word using an early Apple prototype, which was released in 1984 in the original Mac. Multiplan and Chart were also developed under the 512K Mac, and finally they were released together in 1985 as Microsoft Excel: the first sensational retail program to be used on the Macintosh.

As a result, the early Microsoft Office programs had their roots in the Mac and, of course, were reflected in the user interface. As the first and largest software provider for Mac, some of the UI decisions made on the initial Macintosh were influenced by the requirements of the Microsoft development team. Of course, the most basic contours of the Office graphical user interface, specifically the top-level menu bar, have its roots in the first Macintosh version.

The evolution of the Office interface.

Let's take Word as an example to introduce the evolution process of the Office user interface.

1) Microsoft Word for Windows was released in 1989 and runs on Windows 386. Word has an application-level menu bar, which evolved from the Mac's top-level menu bar and the menu displayed at the bottom of the Microsoft DOS program. At the same time, Word also includes a new interface element:

The toolbar was first used in Microsoft Excel. In the Word interface, it looks like there are two toolbars, but in fact only the top one is called a toolbar. Interestingly, the row of buttons at the bottom is called "ribbon".

Microsoft Excel is one of the components of Microsoft Office, Microsoft's office software, which is a spreadsheet software written and run by Microsoft for Windows and Apple Macintosh operating system computers. Excel is an important part of Microsoft Office suite, which can carry out various data processing, statistical analysis and auxiliary decision-making operations, and is widely used in management, statistical finance, finance and many other fields.