Overview of Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets have evolved from their first use. Originally they were designed to do repetitive calculations for engineers and later scientists. Indeed the earliest spreadsheets were written by scientists and engineers to speed up their work. Later specialist programmers started to develop the programs. A early required feature was the ability to plot graphs. Some very sophisticated packages were written to concentrate on this feature.

An important part of spreadsheet development was the function. Modern spreadsheets have hundreds of functions. Early in the development of spreadsheets a package called LOTUS 1-2-3 was produced. This package was intended to be a complete office package. The three packages included were a word processor, spreadsheet and a database. The word processor features were the ability to format text (right and left align) and a spell checker. So you can see it was far from sophisticated. The database features were rudimentary too but they were good for that time. The important thing here is that all spreadsheets subsequently included these features.

Another important development was the use of spreadsheets for financial purposes such as keeping accounts, once spreadsheets began to be used for this accountants wanted more functions added for their purposes. Later specialised accounts packages were developed but spreadsheets kept the rudimentary functions of an accounts package.

MS Excel is a basic spreadsheet. It has tended to stay in the middle without specializing in anything. Most other packages have clear strengths in one area, like scientific purposes, graph drawing, accounts and so on. Within Microsoft office Excel is probably the weakest package, it doesn't compare too well with its rival spreadsheets either. However it has the power of the Microsoft Corporation behind it. One crude test of how good a spreadsheet package is is to count the functions it has Excel has a few over 200 where as Open Office Calc has around 350! The later is free. However how many of those functions will you understand let alone use!

© LEV