I’m no Microsoft fanboy, but Microsoft Excel was very innovative for being one of the first graphical spreadsheets, originally written for the classic Mac OS in the mid-1980s before it was available for Windows. It was Excel, not Word or PowerPoint, that fueled the popularity of Microsoft Office in the 1990s, though admittedly I lament the decline of WordPerfect and other word processors. Sure, Excel might not have been the most innovative graphical spreadsheet; that award goes to Lotus Improv for the NeXT computer. However, Excel was a leap ahead of DOS-based spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3.

There are other innovative Microsoft products. Visual Basic was a very nice rapid GUI development environment in the 1990s. Windows 95’s interface was the result of a lot of research done on the user experience, and the result was a GUI that not only has persisted (with many modifications, of course) for about 30 years, but has inspired other desktops such as various Linux desktops, and in some ways even influenced later Mac operating systems.

Let’s also not forget Microsoft Research, which has produced a lot of interesting work in operating systems and programming language research.

While I agree that Microsoft Excel is a contender for the best Microsoft product ever, I do not see how one can claim that it was a more "graphical" spreadsheet that MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3, except if by "graphical" you just mean that it was a native Windows application, so you did not have to exit Windows and revert to MS-DOS for having the best user experience, like you would have needed with MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 (whose drivers for various hardware graphics devices would not have worked well or at all under Windows emulation).

When Windows 95 has made MS-DOS obsolete, Excel had the huge advantage of being a native Windows application, so I have switched like everybody else from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, because switching between Windows and MS-DOS was unpleasant and inconvenient, and because the new Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows did not have any of the advantages of Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, while being inferior as a Windows program to MS Excel.

Even if I have switched to Excel, for supporting the general Windows features, like nice TrueType fonts and being able to use great amounts of memory in a faster way, due to direct access instead of using extended/expanded memory, at that time Excel did not have any spreadsheet-specific feature, graphic or otherwise, that was better than Lotus 1-2-3.

Despite strongly preferring Windows 95 to MS-DOS, I have always regretted a few MS-DOS programs that had a much better user interface than any Windows program that I have ever seen.

One of those was Lotus 1-2-3. Learning to use MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 was significantly more difficult than learning MS Excel, but once you were an expert the speed of doing any spreadsheet operations using keyboard shortcuts was many times greater than what is possible in Excel with a mouse-based UI, or even with the Excel keyboard shortcuts, which are much less efficient.

While the early Excel was extremely easy to use, that is no longer true about modern Excel or MS Office. Even if I had used for many decades MS Excel and several other spreadsheet applications, when I open now the recent versions of MS Word or MS Excel, I am no longer able to find most of the commands that I need and that I know that they must exist, except after a long random search through various menus, because those no longer have a hierarchical structure whose principles of organization I can discern. This is completely different from older versions of Excel, where one needed no help and no manuals to easily find any required command.