Wacky Facts

Before Excel 2007 the limit was 65,536 rows (2^16). Columns go up to XFD, which is 16,384 (2^14).

Released in 1979, VisiCalc was so useful that businesses bought Apple II machines just to run it — often called the first “killer app”.

Competitors solve spreadsheet puzzles against the clock in live-streamed rounds.

Excel 2007 raised the limit from 7 to 64 nested levels — though a formula that deep usually belongs in LET or a helper column.

Enthusiasts have made working games and 3D engines using only formulas and VBA; Excel esports tournaments exist too.

Excel 97 had a hidden flight-simulator Easter egg; Microsoft later stopped adding such hidden features.

Before VBA, Excel automation used XLM “macro sheets”. Visual Basic for Applications arrived with Excel 5.0 and gradually spread across the Office suite — and it is still running countless business processes today.

It was created by Forethought Inc. and released for the Mac in 1987 as “PowerPoint”. Microsoft bought the company the same year.

Gene names like SEPT1 and MARCH1 were auto-converted to dates. In 2020 the naming committee renamed them, e.g. SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1.

It dominated DOS-era offices in the 1980s; Excel overtook it with the rise of Windows.

Formulas can also nest up to 64 levels of functions. If you ever get close to either limit, it is a strong sign the logic belongs in LET, a helper column or Power Query instead.

The first version of Excel shipped in 1985 for the Apple Macintosh. The first Windows version (Excel 2.0) arrived in 1987.

VBA 6 arrived with Office 2000 and VBA 7 in 2010 mainly added 64-bit support; the language itself is little changed.

1900 was not a leap year, but Excel treats it as one. The bug was copied on purpose from Lotus 1-2-3 so that spreadsheets moved between the two programs would keep the same date serial numbers. It is still there today for compatibility.

Column 16,384 is labelled XFD. Press Ctrl+Right Arrow on an empty row and you will land there.

DATEDIF calculates the difference between two dates in days, months or years. It came from Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility, does not appear in Excel’s function autocomplete, yet still works in every version.

In the default Windows date system, 1 January 1900 is day 1 and each day adds 1, so dates are just formatted numbers. That is why you can subtract two dates to get the days between them, and why a date turns into something like 45,000 when formatting is lost.

Since Excel 2007 every sheet has 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns (A to XFD). Multiply them and you get just over 17 billion cells — per sheet. Your laptop runs out of memory long before you run out of cells.

Lotus Improv (1991) introduced the idea of pivoting data. Excel added PivotTables in version 5.0 in 1993, the same release that brought VBA.

The old .xls format capped sheets at 65,536 rows and 256 columns (IV). Excel 2007’s .xlsx format raised it to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns — 1,024 times more cells.

Word started as “Multi-Tool Word” for Xenix and MS-DOS. Early versions even supported a mouse, which was unusual for DOS programs.