Microsoft Excel - Learn 10 Top Excel Formulas and Functions!

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor (Spreadsheets) produced by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system, in addition to Macintosh computers from Apple Inc. and mobile devices such as Windows Phone, Android or iOS.

Its features include an intuitive interface and powerful calculation and table building tools that, along with aggressive marketing, have made Excel one of the most popular computer applications to date.

It is, with great advantage, the dominant spreadsheet application, available for these platforms and has been since version 5 in 1993 and its inclusion as part of Microsoft Office.

History

The Great Spreadsheet Program called Multiplan in 1982, which was very popular on CP / M systems, but on MS-DOS systems, lost in popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. This led to the development of a new program called Excel, which started with the intention of, in Doug Klunder's words, "doing everything 1-2-3 does and doing better". The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first version for Windows (numbered 2.0 to align with the Mac and distributed with a Windows environment run-time) was released in November 1987. Lotus was slow in bringing 1-2-3 to Windows, and by 1988 Excel had started to pass 1-2-3 in sales and helped Microsoft achieve the leading position in PC software development. This achievement, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future in the development of graphics software. Microsoft has increased its advantage with the regular release of new versions, approximately every two years. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 16, also called Microsoft Excel 2016. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2011

Early in its life, Excel became the subject of a trademark lawsuit by another company that already sold a software package called "Excel" in the financial industry. As a result of the dispute, Microsoft was asked to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel" in all formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time, this practice was ignored, and Microsoft resolved the issue when it purchased the trademark reserved for the other program. She also encouraged the use of the letters XL as an abbreviation for the program; although this practice is no longer common, the program icon in Windows is still formed by a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the standard Excel format up to version 11 (Excel 2003) is .xls, being .xlsx from version 12, following the change in file formats for Microsoft Office applications.

Excel offers many adjustments to the user interface, in relation to the most primitive spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as that of the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc: the cells are organized in rows and columns, and contain data or formulas with relative or absolute references to the other cells.

Excel was the first program of its kind to allow the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and appearance of cells). It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, in which only cells dependent on the cell to be modified are updated (previous programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific command from the user). Excel has advanced graphing capabilities.

Quando integrados pela primeira vez ao Microsoft Office em 1993, o Microsoft Word e o Microsoft PowerPoint tiveram suas GUIs redesenhadas para ficarem consistentes com o Excel, o "programa matador" para o PC na época.

Desde 1993, o Excel tem incluído o Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), uma linguagem de programação baseada no Visual Basic que adiciona a capacidade de automatizar tarefas no Excel e prover funções definidas pelo utilizador (UDF, user defined functions), para uso em pastas de trabalho. O VBA é um complemento poderoso ao aplicativo que, em versões posteriores, inclui um ambiente integrado de desenvolvimento (IDE, integrated development environment). A gravação de macros pode produzir código VBA que replica ações do usuário, desse modo permitindo automação simples de tarefas cotidianas. O VBA permite a criação de formulários e controles dentro da pasta de trabalho para comunicação com o usuário. A linguagem suporta o uso (mas não a criação) de DLLs ActiveX (COM); versões posteriores adicionaram suporte a módulos de classe, permitindo o uso de técnicas básicas de programação orientada a objetos (POO).

Desde a sua criação, mais e mais softwares passaram a interagir com Microsoft Excel tanto para a inserção de bancos de dados como para a emissão de relatórios. Hoje em dia, praticamente todos os ERP's (Enterprise Resource Planning) interagem com o Excel. Até mesmo o SAP, o maior e mais famoso ERP do mundo rendeu-se ao Excel e é alimentado por planilhas e gera relatórios de Excel.

Em 2002, o criador da Microsoft disse que "...tanto faz qual será o seu ERP. Ele será gerado pela recomputação inteligente de células do Excel e o relatório final será em Excel".

A funcionalidade de automação provida pelo VBA fez com que o Excel se tornasse um alvo para vírus de macro. Esse foi um problema sério no mundo corporativo, até os produtos antivírus começarem a detectar tais ameaças. A Microsoft adotou tardiamente medidas para prevenir o mau uso, com a adição da capacidade de desativar as macros completamente, de ativar as macros apenas quando se abre uma pasta de trabalho ou confiar em todas as macros assinadas com um certificado confiável.

As versões 6.0 a 9.0 do Excel contêm vários "ovos de páscoa", porém, desde a versão 10, a Microsoft tomou medidas para eliminar tais recursos não documentados de seus produtos.

In summary, a formula is any calculation in Excel, but a function is a pre-defined calculation.

For example:

=A1/A2 is just a formula
=MAX(A1:B20) is a formula containing a function.