The 40th Anniversary of Excel: Unlocking the fascinating History, Easter Eggs, Excel humor, and more

In this episode of Financial Modeler's Corner, host Paul Barnhurst celebrates the 40th anniversary of Microsoft Excel, a tool that has revolutionized the financial modeling industry and many others. Paul explores Excel’s fascinating history, its evolution over four decades, and shares interesting facts, hidden Easter eggs, and fun surprises that Excel enthusiasts will appreciate. From the first graphical interface to modern-day features like dynamic arrays, this episode showcases how Excel has shaped the way we work and how it continues to be an essential tool for financial modelers.

Expect to Learn

• The fascinating origin story of Excel and its early days on the Mac.

• Fun facts about Excel’s features, including its secret limitations and quirky surprises.

• Excel's functionality has evolved over the years to include over 500 functions.

• Hidden Easter eggs and games that were embedded in older versions of Excel.

• Creative and unique Excel projects, including games and pixel art, showcase the limitless possibilities within Excel.

Here are a few quotes from the episode:

• "The first version of Excel only had 150 functions, and now we’re up to 516! That’s quite a leap over 40 years." - Paul Barnhurst

• "Sometimes, the most creative projects come from using Excel in ways you never thought possible, like pixel art or creating a full video game." - Paul Barnhurst

• "The tool of choice for modelers is Excel, and it has a lot more to offer than meets the eye." - Paul Barnhurst

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In today’s episode:

[02:17] - 16 Fun Facts About Excel

[08:11] - Excel's Evolution

[14:58] - Excel Easter Eggs

[16:55] - Excel Jokes to Lighten the Mood

[19:13] - Epic Excel Creations: Stunning Art

[23:11] - Wrapping Up and Final Thoughts

Full Show Transcript

[00:01:10] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Welcome to Financial Modeler’s Corner. I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka The FP&A Guy And this is a podcast where we talk all about the art and science of financial modeling with distinguished financial modelers from around the globe. This week is a special episode. As many of you may know, this year 2025, Microsoft celebrates its 40th birthday for Excel. Excel was launched in 1985, so I thought it would be fun for this episode to go through some fun things about Excel, some of its history, different releases, some Excel jokes, some fun things done in Excel, and I'm going to share my screen throughout. I encourage you if you're able to watch this episode on video, but you can also listen to it as audio as I will walk through everything I do, but I do think you'll get more out of it.

[00:02:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: There will also be a spreadsheet that I will put on my website that you can download that talks about some of these things. So super excited. I think this will be a really fun episode. It will be unique and different. So why don't we go ahead and get started? First, I'm going to list 16 fun facts about Excel. You could see them here on the spreadsheet if you want to look at it, or I'll just talk to them. So the first many of you may not know this, but Excel was originally launched for the Mac. Yep. That's right. When Excel was released in 1985, it was only available on the Mac. A couple other interesting facts. The original codename for Excel was Odyssey. Also, when they considered names for Excel, they had these doozies. First, they considered it seriously. It was one of the finalists naming it Mr. Spreadsheet. Could you imagine saying to all your students now please open Mr. Spreadsheet and how that would be perceived by, you know, females and other people? The other name they considered was Master Plan. The first version of a spreadsheet Microsoft released before Excel was called Multi Plan. So it's probably similar to that. This I found really fascinating. I didn't know this until I did my research.

[00:03:29] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Excel was the first computer application in the world to use a toolbar. Nobody had ever used a toolbar in a software application until Excel did it. I believe it was Excel 3.0. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. There's more than 500 functions today. 516. We'll talk about that as well a little bit later. Excel today supports 16 million colors. This is a really interesting one that I'm going to guess most people didn't know. You cannot name a worksheet as history in Excel. It's saved for versions. It saves history there. I just tried doing it today. It doesn't work. It says that name is reserved. Another interesting one is Dates in Excel. The first date in Excel is actually the number zero. But what's really weird is if you put the number zero in, the date you'll get is. Saturday, January zero, 1900. Excel also considers 1900 a leap year, even though it actually wasn't a leap year because of the zero. So some interesting facts there. Number eight, all of us use undo controls, one of the most used functions in Excel. But did you know the maximum number of times you can undo something is 100? So if you have 101 to do well, you're screwed. You can only go to 100. A workbook can only contain a certain number of hyperlinks. I don't know how anyone ever used this many, but you can only have 65,530 hyperlinks if you go over that limit.

[00:05:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You'll get an error, surprisingly enough. Your charts. You can have up to 255 data series in one chart. I would argue if you have that many, you have bigger problems but don't have 256 or you'll get an error. Next you can have 17.2 billion cells in Excel. Technically you could fill all of them, although I would argue your computer would bomb out. It can't handle the memory, at least if you try to write a formula that spills to all of them. I tried it with a dynamic array and it definitely could not do it. 17.2 billion of the memory couldn't handle it. Next, Excel can handle big numbers, but if you go more than 15 digits, what will happen is Excel will start rounding. So if you're dealing with super large numbers, you will start to get errors in Excel. Next, Excel actually has a limit to its file size. I did not know this. I was not aware there's a limit. The limit is two gigabytes. The biggest file I've ever opened was a gigabyte in Excel. I have not got close to two. If anyone has, please email me. I'd love to know what that monstrosity was. Generally, you know, people say it's huge. If it's like 3050. Meg, I've seen a billion. You can go all the way up to 2 billion for two gigabytes. So 2 billion bytes.

[00:06:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Did you know the formula bar in Excel can only, and I use the word only loosely, can only handle up to 32,767 characters. So don't go over that when you're writing your functions. If you do, maybe you need a helper column. Next, I don't know how much new this is, but Excel pixel art is a real thing. You Google it. You'll find all kinds of art out there. But the most interesting is a guy by the name of tattoos, Hiroshi, who made a living out of Japan and will share a little bit more about that later. Building beautiful art and excel. Next, one of the most interesting functions I think in Excel is the bot text function. So it's a bar and it was originally created in the Thailand version of Excel to display a number in Thai as a text. They needed that for some of the things they were doing to help with some kind of regulation, and it made its way into the full version of Excel. So it's one of the most unique functions, because most people look at it and go, why would I ever use that? Why would I want a number to be converted to text in Thai? So there's a few interesting facts. Next, what I want to do is I want to go through a little bit of the high level Excel timeline. And with that we're going to look at some images.

[00:08:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm going to talk to them just to show some of the original old screens. There's a great website that shows the 40 years of history. So first let's just talk a little bit of history. So Excel was released in 1985. It was the first Microsoft spreadsheet that had a graphical user interface. Multi plan was a command user interface. Interestingly enough, the very first version only had 16,384 rows, 256 columns. Then it had roughly 150 functions. 1987 version two was released. They added roughly 20 new functions, and these are estimates. It probably wasn't until about 97 2000 I got a clear number of functions. I kind of gould use ChatGPT and try to make some estimates. In 1987 they released it with roughly 170 functions. They added the menu option, which we are all used to today. They upgraded it to 65,536 rows, but kept the number of columns that stayed that way all the way until the 2007 version, when they added 1.1 million rows and 16 columns, which is where the 17.2 billion cells come from. The next one is 1990. That's when Microsoft Excel was released with the toolbar. First software ever to have a toolbar? And that's when it killed Lotus one, two, three. That's really where they started to get dominance 90. And it just continued 92. They added charts. The huge upgrade was 93 VBA 1995. They included the office package. At this point they had roughly 300 functions.

[00:09:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So they doubled in about the first decade. The first ten years or so went from 150 to 397. They added VBA mode and another 25 functions are. So around 2000 they added a few more functions, added new charts. Tables which were originally listed came in 2003 2007 big eight update was the toolbars in the ribbon and the million rows. So just think about that. We're also used to these types of things, but they weren't there. Pivot charts weren't added until 2010, only 15 years ago. And we saw Excel Online come around then. Um, flash fill was added in 2013. At this point we had 460. They added roughly 50 new functions in 2010 and another 50 in 2013. Huge upgrades in 2016. That version, and they had at first it was an add in that it became native. You saw Power Query, Power Pivot, waterfall charts before that. I still remember working in a and having all these workarounds using a scatterplot or a bar chart, or different ways to create a waterfall chart. The next big upgrade was 2021. Added dynamic arrays. At this point we had roughly 482 functions. Then there's 2024 which added another 20 functions. It added dynamics, charts, images, etc.. Microsoft 365 today has roughly 516 functions. The most recent was just released in August of 2025, called Copilot, and it allows you to call things from AI using the copilot function.

[00:11:40] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Some other notable things. 2015 was the first mobile version of Excel. 2020 is when they implemented dynamic arrays, which completely changed the way they work in Excel. 2023 is when we got a lambdas which made Excel Turing complete. When that came out. So that's a little bit of history. Now for fun, we're going to go through and look at some of the design pages and I'll comment about those. So we're going to go to the website. You'll be able to find the website in the Excel document that will be on my website. But what's amazing is I'm looking at multiple cans. Multiple can was nothing but numbers command line. You know, it wasn't a graphical user interface. Just imagine what that would look like. Then we have Microsoft Excel for the Mac. Completely white background, blocky text, the spreadsheet just has a little bit of today, but it looks so different seeing it in a mac and it just keeps going, you know. Excel 2.0 for windows blue background with that purple and fluorescent blue color. And you're just looking at it going wow, that's ugly. But it was huge for today. You know had virtually no memory like in one of the images here. It shows conventional memory, expanded memory, the formula ribbon file edit gallery chart format macro window. Just think how different that is. And what would those be? And then they show more images.

[00:13:10] Host: Paul Barnhurst: We get up to 1990. You know it starts to look a little more similar to today but still a very different menu. We have file edit formula format data much closer to today's options macro window help. And it just keeps going. I won't spend a lot of time here because I know many are listening to this. But you know, you can see the progression that we go through on the screen can still remember, you know, 95 or actually, yeah, windows 95. We started to get little icons for everything and it was just a very different look of the toolbar. We even had it in version 593, but it just became much more pronounced and it just keeps going. I have about 70 images here. You can see what 2000 looked like. And, you know, we eventually get to where today's ribbon is and just think, you know, it looks so different when I look at today and excel. So kind of a fun history encourages you to go through that. We've talked about some of the functions next I think is fun.

[00:14:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: While my background is in FP&A. I am also passionate about financial modeling. Like many financial Modelers, I was self-taught. Then I discovered the Financial Modeling Institute, the organization that offers the advanced financial modeling program. I am a proud holder of the AFM. Preparing for the AFM exam made me a better modeler. If you want to improve your modeling skills, I recommend the AFM program. Podcast listeners. Save 15% on the AFM program. Just use Code Podcast.

[00:14:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So I want to share a little bit about the different Easter eggs. I'm not sure how many of you are aware of this, but for a long time Microsoft Office products have Easter eggs in them. And for Excel, these Easter eggs were mostly games. So in 1995, they had what they called the Hall of Tortured Souls. It was similar to doom if anyone played doom. First person shooter game, very popular in the 90s. I remember playing it in high school, so it was a doom style game in the Excel file. Like I said, you can download from my website. I put a YouTube video if you want to go see a little bit of what it looked like. You know, pretty amazing to think that was available in Excel in 95. They also had 3D animated credits for the developers of the show. In 1997 they added a flight simulator. And here's just an image of the Hall of Tortured Souls. I mean, just a very basic, almost brick style game. The flight simulator, again, very clunky, right? In your spreadsheet, you see, you can fly this plane. And so that was 97. The next 1 in 2000, they created one called dev Hunter where you could race a car. And so that was the 2000 version, 2001. They also had the special formula one animation in 2003.

[00:16:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: They had a tic tac toe and Space Invaders game. In 2019, they added a formula called Clippy where you could return Clippy and see an image of Clippy. There's a website called Excel Easter Eggs fun and hidden Surprises you might have missed. That's where I got a lot of this, and it has instructions. If you can find a copy of these different Excel of how to access the games and access these Easter eggs. So if you're one of those nerds that want to have a lot of fun, go ahead and give it a try. It could be fun for you. All right, so that's a little bit about the Easter eggs. Next we're going to go through a list of some of my favorite Excel jokes. So that's what we're going to do next. I have about ten here that I have listed, and we're just going to run through those jokes. So here we go. Number one, what do you call a broken spreadsheet? The new employees problem. Or sometimes I've heard it said as the intern's problem. What did the data analyst put in his hair sum product? Do you know what you say when you make a mistake in Excel? Not that you say, oh, sheet, have you ever wondered why the spreadsheet was constipated? Well, it's because it couldn't budget. That's for my audience. What is the best cell to store your Excel error messages in its column F you row two.

[00:18:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: What do Men and Excel have in common? They're both trying to turn everything into dates when they are not dates. What do gold diggers and Excel have in common? If you want them to stay in place, you have to throw money at them. What does every newborn spreadsheet need? Formula. Does anyone know why the spreadsheet hated his job? Too many functions. These next two. One comes from Jordan Goldmine and one comes from Chandu. Both Microsoft Excel and VP's. An analyst walks into a bar. Ouch. A pivot table walks into a bar and orders a beer. It says to the bartender, put me in the same cab, will ya? All right, so there's our nerdy Excel jokes. We've done our Easter eggs. We've talked about the function history from 150 roughly to 500 plus. Just all these amazing Excel things made fun facts about Excel. Now I'm going to go ahead and share a couple fun Excel websites, and I'll talk about what I'm seeing here. So if you want to see this you can also follow along on video on YouTube. So the first site is the seven most epic Excel creations ever. Beautiful pieces of art. And here shows somebody having created some trees. This is, Tatsuya Horikoshi who created amazing art in Excel. And if you're lucky, you could see it. If you're not, it's these trees, very kind of white blossoms with a background in the sun.

[00:19:51] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Amazing artwork. Something you would never think was created in Excel. Next, someone created a full length role playing game. Carrie Walken, an accountant from Canada, It took him five months and he released it in March of 2013. It features 2000 potential enemies in a storyline with four different endings depending on how you navigate the game. So you can go to my website, download the file if you want to play the game. Another person showed how you can convert any photo into an Excel spreadsheet. It's what Matthysse calls cracking the digital photo file open, scraping out all the numbers and putting them into the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. That's how he describes the process. So the process is cracking the digital file photo file open, scraping out all the numbers and putting them into Excel's in an Excel spreadsheet. There's a video about that. Again, if you go to the Excel file, you can go check that out. You know, kind of amazing. Think about that. How many of you would want their digital files all put in Excel? And he has a very unique way of doing that with putting it through numbers. It's really fascinating. In fact, if we click here for one minute, he has a fun video that kind of walks through him doing that. And it is pretty amazing.

[00:21:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Some of your favorite songs and maybe you'll be in my next video.

[00:21:21] Host: Paul Barnhurst: We also have another one where somebody does musical animation in Excel. There's a video for that, so you can check that one out as well. Another great guy is, Clint Tuttle, professor at UT Austin. He shares a lot of great, fun YouTube videos, um, funk parody, making fun of, Uptown Funk and several others. He does the Justin Bieber one, so check that out. So many other things. Creating a Sudoku in Excel. One of the more interesting ones Chandu did is he created an Excel pendulum using a scatter chart that is animated with an amazing 3D dancing pendulum, so you wouldn't think that you could do that with a scatter plot. But he shows these pendulums swinging back and forth and up and down. And so those are just some examples of many of the different things. You know, there are a lot of other great websites that just have all kinds of fun things that have been done in Excel. The last one is Tom Hinkle. I've played this many times. He created minesweeper, the original minesweeper game. If any of you remember it, I have it up here on my screen for those who are watching and you can just click New Game. It brings up a game in Excel and then what you do is once the game loads you just try to find the bombs. It's really quiet, you know, it's quite fun to do that. I hit a bomb on my very first try, so I need to start over. But I can click on that. I can try to find the patterns and see if I can actually locate all the bombs without blowing myself up.

[00:23:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So anyway, I probably talk too long. You may find this a boring episode, but with Excel turning 40, I thought it would be fun to just have an Excel themed episode. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled episodes next week as we bring in some great guests, and we have some exciting series and other things coming up that we'll be doing. So really excited to continue this series on Excel and excited for you to join us and learn more. Okay, I'm going to pause. Cut, cut that last part. Cut the last few seconds and I'm going to redo the ending. All right. Well that about wraps it up. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you had fun with this episode. Going back to next week, we'll go back to the guest style episodes we offer. We hope to have an announcement in the next few weeks of some other fun things we're doing, but stay tuned. Keep listening, keep being a great modeler. And remember, you know, the tool of choice for modelers is Excel. It's 40 years old. It's not going anywhere. It's something to be celebrated. All that's accomplished. So thanks for joining me. And until next week I'm signing off. We'll talk to you soon.

[00:24:31] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Financial Modeler's Corner was brought to you by the Financial Modeling Institute. This year, I completed the Advanced Financial Modeler certification and it made me a better financial modeler. What are you waiting for? Visit FMI at www.FMInstitute.com/podcast and use Code Podcast to save 15% when you enroll in one of the accreditations today.