SubscribeA Brief History of Microsoft Excel – Timeline Visualization
Timeline charts are great for providing quick snapshots of historical events. And hardly a day goes by without some one making a cool visualization of a time line of this or that. Time lines are easy to read, present information in a logical manner and mostly fun.
So yesterday, I set out to mimic the iconic gadgets of all time in excel, just for fun. Then it strike me, why not make a visual time line of Microsoft Excel ? So I did that instead.
Here is a brief history of Microsoft Excel, in a visual time line
As you can guess, the chart is made in Excel. Read on if you want to know how this is constructed.
- The basic time line construction is similar to the one shown in project timeline chart article.
- What you are seeing is a bar chart with some formatting. The bars are made invisible.
- We use 100% negative vertical error bars to show the leader lines.
- Data labels show the messages like “VisiCalc launched”
- To show the years, I have used another dummy series and plotted it on secondary axis (related: how to add secondary axis?)
- Once the basic timeline is ready, I have added various images (logos) to the chart by pasting them inside the chart and manually adjusting their positions.
- Rest of the work is anybody’s guess.
- If you are curious to know how this works, download the source files [Excel 2003 version, Excel 2007 version]
It is hard to imagine that it has been only 25 years since this beautiful tool took birth and shaped in to such a massive productivity application.
Source of information on History of Excel and Logos:
- Various excel versions and their information [Spreadsheet Page]
- History of spreadsheets and VisiCalc [DSS Resouces]
- Excel for Mac – Press Kit [Microsoft Press Pass]
- Excel Splash Screens – Right from version 1.0 [Guidebook Gallery]
Your comments?
Do you like this visualization? How would you improve this? Also, if you are an excel veteran, share your memories and experiences…
More visualization projects:
- Olympic Medals won by each country since 1900
- Test Cricket Statistics in an Excel Dashboard
- 50 Best Cities to find a job
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Pingback by Sachin Tendulkar ODI Stats – an Excel Info-graphic Poster | Pointy Haired Dilbert: Learn Excel Online - Chandoo.org on February 26, 2010 @ 9:39 am
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
If you have a question, please ask in the forums
At Pointy Haired Dilbert, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". PHD is started in 2007 and today has 300+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts. 
You may want to include Microsoft’s first spreadsheet program, Multiplan, which was released in 1982 for CP/M computers and then ported to other operating systems. My first job after high school, in 1983, was German localization of Multiplan, and translation of the user manual. I have been using Microsoft spreadsheet software for 27 years, and I still learn new tricks from PHD!
I’m astonished to see this reminder that Lotus 1-2-3 began life in 1983, because I can clearly remember writing my first parameter driven costing model for some heavy-weight proposals around that time (if pressed I would have said earlier). They were quite complex and usually adopted by the accountants (I was just a business development guy) without too much cross-checking. The power of the spreadsheet was immense, and the same model survived until at least 1994 (by then in Excel).
Nice job!
FWIW, that information at “computer literacy” was stolen from my site:
http://spreadsheetpage.com/index.php/resource/excel_version_history/
Office XP had Smart Tags and Task Panes
Office 2003 was Lists and XML
Also not very sure about this but the word VBA came only in 97 – till then the language was reffered to as Excel Basic
Not true, Sam. It was called VBA in Excel 5.
@Gregor… Thanks for the pointer. I heard about Multiplan, but didnt include it as it was not really connected to visicalc-lotus 123-excel route. But I can add it to the download file.
My first brush with spreadsheets was in 1997, when I learned about lotus 123 (along with wordstar and dBase III). I wasnt keen on lotus 123 at that time as I found it pretty futile. Next time I used a spreadsheet program was excel in 2003 and by then I was writing programs to make spreadsheets from java and vb script to create reports…
@John: A well defined model stands the test of time and just works. I have defined an excel based qtrly reporting system way back in 2006 and last heard, folks are still using it. Spreadsheets have immense power to analyze, organize and process data without complicating it.
@John… I have replaced the link now. I saw your page too, but failed to realize the duplication. Thanks for the pointer.
@Sam.. my bad, I have used the info from web to make it, I have been using excel only since 2003, so I am not aware of some of the specifics of each version…. thanks.