Purpose and capabilities of a spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a program for presenting and processing data in table form, and above all for automating calculations. For example, a shop totals the sales of 200 products every day: on a calculator this is very laborious, and if one price changes everything must be redone; in a spreadsheet the formula is written once and the result updates itself when the data changes. Its capabilities: presenting and formatting data in a table, formulas and standard functions, automatic filling of cells, search and replace, sorting and filtering, and building charts from the data. The first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, was created in 1979 by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston; the most widespread today are Microsoft Excel, the free LibreOffice Calc and the online Google Sheets. The file is called a workbook (in Excel the extension is .xlsx, in old versions .xls) and consists of one or more sheets. A sheet’s columns are labelled with letters (A, B, ..., Z, AA, ..., XFD – 16,384 in all) and its rows with numbers (1 to 1,048,576); old Excel (up to 2003) had 256 columns and 65,536 rows. Operations: + (add), – (subtract), * (multiply), / (divide), ^ (power) and brackets; the decimal separator (comma or point) depends on regional settings. Moving around: arrow keys, PgUp/PgDn, Home, End, Ctrl+Home (to A1) and Ctrl+End (to the last cell).