Before Microsoft Excel established itself as the industry standard for spreadsheet applications, one of the first consumer software applications ever built was a program called VisiCalc that ran exclusively on the Apple II. In-fact, VisiCalc was the #1 reason people & small businesses would by a personal computer in the first place because they provided an electronic and thus easily editable solution to manually filling in sheets of table ledgers that would "spread" across multiple pages in a book to handle large calculations. Could you imagine how tedious it would be to manually update every resulting calculation whenever you made a change to the underlying data like... you know... selling a another unit of your product.

VisiCalc's position at the top of spread sheet mountain was short-lived when Lotus 1-2-3 added easier to use functionality, more powerful calculations, and the ability to create graphs from the data in your spreadsheet. Lotus 1-2-3 quickly became one of the best selling pieces of software of all time. Given that you're reading this in the 21st century you can probably guess that Microsoft made quick work of taking over the spreadsheet world when they leveraged their position of owning the most dominant Operating System ever (Windows) to build out Microsoft Excel, which was originally known as Multiplan (not Multipass you 5th Element nerds...). Microsoft Excel introduced even more user friendly features like drop-down menus, tool-bars and wizards. Quickly, essential features like charting and graphing were added directly to spreadsheet software to make it easier to communicate the results of your calculations in a visual way with others.

We now live in an era where computers can surpass the intelligence of humans within a specialized domain but one thing that that has not changed is the universal employer demand for people with the skills to utilize spreadsheet software to solve business problems. In-fact, according to a Burning Glass report that analyzed millions of job postings to discover what skills employers list most in their job description requirements, Microsoft Excel was the #1 technical skill listed.

Let's jump right in and get acquainted with the first critical topic in Excel, Workbooks, Worksheets & Cells.