What is spreadsheet ?
| Spreadsheets |
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The first spreadsheet was marketed in 1979. The name was of the product was VisiCalc and it helped turn the Apple II into a great deal more than the hobbyist's toy that it started out to be. In fact, VisiCalc was the first application developed for a microcomputer that really sold the computer. Four years later, the launch of Lotus 1-2-3 did the same thing for the IBM PC, turning the still developing new product into a must-have item in the business world. What spreadsheets do What made spreadsheets so hot? Well, to understand that you need to be able to picture the type of problems spreadsheets solve and what life was like before the advent of computer spreadsheets. Trying to track this information by hand involves listing all the different expense categories, the amounts you spend in each, the cost of producing each item in your inventory, the margin you sell it at, your sales volume on each type of widget, and so on. Picture all these figures in a grid of rows and columns, with categories listed down the side and months across the top to track expenses over time. Numbers in one cell will depend on the values in others, and so the whole grid will be dynamic. Before computer spreadsheets, companies needing to track this sort of information would create vast grids of figures, either on long blackboards (sometimes stretching the length of rooms) or on massive sheets of paper. As one figure was updated, any dependent numbers would need to be adjusted to reflect the changes, necessitating much rubbing out and rewriting. Because the grid contained not just simple figures but also relationships between figures (formulas) you can imagine how easy it was in a spreadsheet of any size to let an error slip in. |
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