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:
- Excel MVP and Author Zack Barresse – Buy his Excel Tables book
- Excel MVP and Author Kevin Jones – Co Author with Zack of the Excel Tables Book
- Excel MVP and Author Jordan Goldmeier – Pick up his Advanced Excel Essentials book here.
- Excel MVP and Author Oz du Soleil – Pick up his Guerrilla Data Analysis book here.
The Trivia Questions
Many of the questions were derived from Bill Jelen’s book “The Spreadsheet at 25”.
- Name these two prominent figures in Excel history?
- Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston – The inventors of Visicalc
- In the 1960’s, Berkeley Professor Robert Mattessich used what programming language to build a what-if style budgeting application?
- Fortran
- In 1975, the Texas Instruments T1-10 calculator costs _____ ?
- $50
- 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
- What is this? picture indicates early version of Visicalc that looks more like a very old version of Pong.
- VisiCalc
- 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
- =ROWS (A:A) * COLUMNS (1:1) yields _____?
- 17,179,869,184
- What Excel function can be used to replicate alternate row shading effect with conditional formatting?
- MOD()
- Name as many Excel MVPs as you can in the next 30 seconds (excluding yourselves).
- Bill Jelen
- Bob Umlas
- Mynda Treacy
- Chris “Smitty” Smith
- Jacob Hildebrand
- Chandoo
- Debra Dalgleish
- Jon Acampora
- Mike Girvin
- Bob Phillips
- Ken Puls
- Jan Karel Pieterse
- Roger Govier
- Hui – From Chandoo’s blog
- Daniel Ferry
- Ingeborg Hawighorst
- Jon Peltier
- Who is dubbed the “Father of the Pivot Table”?
- C – Pito Salas
- Which company famously takes credit for the invention of the Pivot Table?
- A – Lotus
- 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.
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