Office and SharePoint 2007 User's Guide: Integrating SharePoint with Excel, Outlook, Access, and Word

Chapter 7. Managing SharePoint Lists from Excel

Along with MS Word, MS Excel is one of the oldest products in the Microsoft Office Suite. Microsoft developed Excel in the early days of PCs after the wildly successful introduction of Lotus 1-2-3, which was one of the great early productivity tools that helped to justify using PCs in many business offices. But even before Lotus was introduced, VisiCalc and MultiPlan, an early predecessor to Microsoft Excel, tested the spreadsheet waters. The ability to work with rows and columns of numbers took advantage of a familiar paradigm for accountants and finance departments to work within. And since finance departments often controlled the use of computers at many companies, the speed of developing a ...