Glossary

It's hard to remember what our lives were like without e-mail. Ranking up there with the Web as one of the most useful features of the Internet, e-mail has become one of today's standard means of communication. Billions of messages are sent each year. If you're like most people these days, you probably have more than one e-mail address. After all, the more addresses you have, the more sophisticated you look...

E-mail is part of the standard TCP/IP set of protocols. Sending messages is typically done by SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and receiving messages is handled by POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). IMAP is the newer protocol, allowing you to view and sort messages on the mail server, without downloading them to your hard drive.

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program for Windows and Macintosh computers. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite, which includes other productivity programs, such as Word and PowerPoint.

Though Excel is developed by Microsoft, the first version of the program was released for the Macintosh in 1985. It wasn't until 1987, when Microsoft introduced Windows 3.0, that Excel was made available for Windows. Since then, Microsoft has supported the program on both platforms, releasing updates about every two years.