A spreadsheet is an application on a computer whose purpose is to organize, analyze, and store data in tabular form. Spreadsheets are nothing more than the digital evolution of paper worksheets. Accountants once collected all the data in large ledgers full of printouts, from which they extracted the accounts. Even the goods in a warehouse were recorded in paper registers made up of rows and columns, in which dates, costs, and various descriptions were reported.
Such a tool has followed the evolution of the times, becoming an office software like spreadsheets, of which the most famous version is precisely Microsoft Excel.
Spreadsheets are programs that operate on data entered in cells within different tables. Each cell can contain both numbers and text strings. With appropriate formulas, you can perform calculations between values contained in areas of selected cells and automatically show the result in another cell. By modifying the values in the operand cells, the value in the cell intended for the result will also be modified in real-time. Spreadsheets, compared to paper worksheets, in addition to organizing the data in tabular form, introduce a certain degree of interaction, in which the user is able to select the data visually, insert calculation formulas, and view the results in real-time.
The figure below shows how Spreadsheets are the digital evolution of Paper Worksheets, adding new useful properties:
Another technology that has enormously marked the evolution of data management is relational databases. We'll discuss about this in the next post.
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