Microsoft Excel Trivia Questions and Answers 2 — Questions and Answers

Question 1: In what year was Microsoft Excel first released for Windows?

1987 (Correct answer)
1985
1990
1983

Correct answer: 1987

Excel 2.0 for Windows was released in 1987. The first version of Excel (1.0) was actually released for the Macintosh in 1985.

Microsoft Excel has a rich history. Excel 1.0 was released exclusively for Apple Macintosh in September 1985. Excel 2.0, the first Windows version, launched in November 1987. The version numbering started at 2.0 for Windows to match the existing Mac version. Before Excel, Microsoft had a spreadsheet called Multiplan, but it was losing market share to Lotus 1-2-3. Excel was specifically designed to be superior to Lotus 1-2-3 and eventually became the dominant spreadsheet application worldwide.

Question 2: Which spreadsheet application was Excel primarily designed to compete against?

Lotus 1-2-3 (Correct answer)
VisiCalc
Quattro Pro
Google Sheets

Correct answer: Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the spreadsheet market in the 1980s, and Microsoft developed Excel specifically to surpass it in features and usability.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the dominant spreadsheet application throughout the 1980s, running on IBM PC DOS. It combined spreadsheet, graphing, and database functions (hence the name 1-2-3). VisiCalc was the original spreadsheet (1979) that made personal computers a business tool, but Lotus 1-2-3 overtook it. Microsoft's Multiplan struggled against Lotus, so Microsoft created Excel with a graphical interface for the Macintosh first. When Windows gained popularity, Excel's superior GUI crushed Lotus 1-2-3, which was slow to adapt from its DOS roots. Quattro Pro (by Borland) was another competitor but never achieved Lotus's market share.

Question 3: What hidden Easter egg game could be found in Excel 97?

A flight simulator (Correct answer)
A pinball game
A maze game
A card game

Correct answer: A flight simulator

Excel 97 contained a hidden flight simulator Easter egg that could be accessed through a specific sequence of steps involving the chart wizard and a particular cell reference.

Excel 97 famously contained a hidden 3D flight simulator Easter egg. To access it, you would create a new workbook, press F5, type X97:L97, press Tab, then hold Ctrl+Shift and click the Chart Wizard button. This launched a 3D landscape where you could fly around. Excel 2000 had a car racing game, and Excel 2003 had no known Easter egg. Microsoft stopped including Easter eggs in Office products after 2003 due to security and code audit concerns. These hidden features were created by developers during their spare time and became legendary among Excel enthusiasts.

Question 4: What is the name of the programming language built into Excel for creating macros?

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) (Correct answer)
JavaScript
Python
ExcelScript

Correct answer: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) has been Excel's built-in programming language since Excel 5.0 (1993), allowing users to automate tasks and create custom functions.

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) has been integrated into Excel since version 5.0 in 1993. It allows users to record and write macros, create user forms, build custom functions (UDFs), automate repetitive tasks, and interact with other Office applications. VBA uses the same syntax as Visual Basic 6 but runs within the host application. While Microsoft has introduced newer options like Office Scripts (TypeScript-based, for Excel online) and Python in Excel (announced 2023), VBA remains the most widely used Excel programming tool due to its decades of legacy code and community knowledge.

Question 5: What was the original name Microsoft considered for Excel before its official release?

Odyssey (Correct answer)
Matrix
Multiplan 2
TableCalc

Correct answer: Odyssey

During development, Excel was code-named Odyssey. Microsoft eventually chose the name Excel, though they had to settle a trademark dispute with another company that already had a product called Excel.

Excel was developed under the code name Odyssey. When Microsoft chose the name Excel for release, they faced a trademark dispute with Manufacturers Hanover Trust, which had a financial product called Excel. Microsoft eventually acquired the rights but for a time had to refer to the product as Microsoft Excel to distinguish it. The code name Odyssey reflected the ambitious journey of creating a spreadsheet that could dethrone Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft had a tradition of using interesting code names — Word was initially called Multi-Tool Word, and Windows was called Interface Manager during development.

Question 6: How many columns are in an Excel worksheet from Excel 2007 onward?

16,384 (Correct answer)
256
65,536
1,048,576

Correct answer: 16,384

Excel 2007 expanded the column count from 256 (IV) to 16,384 (XFD), which is 2^14 columns.

Excel 2007's .xlsx format supports 16,384 columns (2^14), labeled A through XFD. The older .xls format had only 256 columns (2^8), labeled A through IV. This expansion, combined with 1,048,576 rows (2^20), gives modern Excel over 17 billion cells per worksheet. The column labels use a base-26 system: A-Z (26), then AA-AZ (26), BA-BZ (26), and so on through XFD. Despite the vast grid, practical limits are determined by available memory. Most users work with far fewer columns, but the expanded limit is important for data imports, pivot table outputs, and complex financial models.

Microsoft Excel Trivia Questions and Answers 2

In what year was Microsoft Excel first released for Windows?