Microsoft Excel is a proprietary

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

 commercial

Commercial software

Commercial software, or less commonly, payware, is computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes.Commercial software is most often proprietary software, but free software packages may also be commercial software....

 spreadsheet

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...

 application written and distributed by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot table

Pivot table

In data processing, a pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets or business intelligence software. Among other functions, pivot-table tools can automatically sort, count, total or give the average of the data stored in one table or spreadsheet...

s, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications

Visual Basic for Applications

Visual Basic for Applications is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6 and its associated integrated development environment , which are built into most Microsoft Office applications...

. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993, and it has almost completely replaced Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...

 as the industry standard for spreadsheets. Excel forms part of Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

.