Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet when DOS was the dominant operating system. VisiCalc (1979) was the first electronic spreadsheet on a microcomputer, and it helped turn the Apple II computer into a popular and widely used system. LANPAR was an acronym: LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random. LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet on mainframe and time sharing computers.

Although they were first developed for accounting or bookkeeping tasks, they now are used extensively in any context where tabular lists are built, sorted, and shared. Spreadsheets have replaced paper-based systems throughout the business world. Spreadsheet programs also provide conditional expressions, functions to convert between text and numbers, and functions that operate on strings of text. Such calculations as net present value or standard deviation can be applied to tabular data with a pre-programmed function in a formula. Modern spreadsheet software can have multiple interacting sheets and can display data either as text and numerals or in graphical form.īesides performing basic arithmetic and mathematical functions, modern spreadsheets provide built-in functions for common financial accountancy and statistical operations. This makes the spreadsheet useful for 'what-if' analysis since many cases can be rapidly investigated without manual recalculation. Spreadsheet users can adjust any stored value and observe the effects on calculated values. The term spreadsheet may also refer to one such electronic document. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate and display a value based on the contents of other cells. The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. Example of a spreadsheet holding data about a group of audio tracks.Ī spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form.

Simple budget spreadsheet template