Excel Trivia – Quiz about the History of Excel & Spreadsheets

Excel Trivia

Four Excel MVPs test their Excel knowledge in this competition.  Excel trainer and consultant Szilvia Juhasz served as host for the segment titled “Wait, Don’t Excel Me”.

The contestants:

The Trivia Questions

Many of the questions were derived from Bill Jelen’s book “The Spreadsheet at 25”.

  1.  Name these two prominent figures in Excel history?
  2. In the 1960’s, Berkeley Professor Robert Mattessich used what programming language to build a what-if style budgeting application?
    • Fortran
  3. In 1975, the Texas Instruments T1-10 calculator costs _____ ?
    • $50
  4. Describe the hidden events on Chandoo’s History of Excel graph – the Excel version and at least one feature.  The graph indicates 1990 and a993
    • 1990 – Excel 3 with 3-D charts
    • 1993 – Excel 5 with VBA
  5. What is this?  picture indicates early version of Visicalc that looks more like a very old version of Pong.
    • VisiCalc
  6. Match that Excel guy.  Various pictures of from the history of Excel and Spreadsheets including Bob Umlas.
    • C – Charles Simonyi – Lead Excel / Word app developer
    • A – Doug Klunder – Microsoft programmer
    • B – Bob Umlas – Longest running Excel MVP
    • N/A – Dan Bricklin, Inventor of Visicalc
    • G – Bob Frankston, inventor of Visicalc
    • I – Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft executive
  7. =ROWS (A:A) * COLUMNS (1:1) yields _____?
    • 17,179,869,184
  8. What Excel function can be used to replicate alternate row shading effect with conditional formatting?
    • MOD()
  9. Name as many Excel MVPs as you can in the next 30 seconds (excluding yourselves).
  10. Who is dubbed the “Father of the Pivot Table”?
    • C – Pito Salas
  11. Which company famously takes credit for the invention of the Pivot Table?
    • A – Lotus
  12. Before the term “Pivot Table” was invented, the project was originally called _________?
    • Lotus Improv

How would you have answered these questions?

Leave your comments below.

Rick Grantham
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