Where it Started – A Little History
Way way back in time, before the advent of the computer…. industries, like finance, accounting, retail and manufacturing used manually created tables in paper ledgers to record transactions, perform budgeting, forecasting, manage inventories and plan production.
Paper accounting ledgers would typically have individual transactions stored in rows and different categories of data about that transaction in each column. i.e.
| Date | Quantity | Price | Total | Tax @ 20% |
| 02/01/1968 | 1 | $100 | $100 | $20 |
| 02/01/1968 | 2 | $90 | $180 | … |
| 02/01/1968 | 4 | $80 | $320 | … |
| Total Tax: | ?? |
Imagine having a list of 100 transactions to total manually. Leafing through 100 individual receipts is laborious and very error prone, but a list of 100 transactions in a table? You can easily make your way down and sum them up using your calculator, abacus or whatever people used back then!
If you wanted to calculate the total tax due it’s easy to setup your calcualtion on a calculator, perform it for the first row, record the result, and then again for the next row, record and so on. Finally it’s then also simple to sum all the tax amounts from the same column by entering them into your calculator one after the next and adding them.
Recording figures in a tabular format makes life easer when it comes to finding specific things, summarizing data by performing calculations and auditing and checking accuracy.
This principle of working is the basis for the spreadsheet.
Paper Ledgers Evolve into Electronic Spreadsheets
Some bright spark invented the personal computer in 1974, and another bright spark, Dan Bricklin to be exect, who had experience with paper based ledgers, decided a good use of the personal computer would be to computerize paper ledgers. The first real spreadsheet application was born in 1979 and was called VisiCalc. In the 1980’s Lotus 1-2-3 built on VisiCalc by adding more features (like Charting) and in the mid 1980’s Microsoft introduced Excel.
Excel has been the industry standard for spreadsheets ever since. And yes, Excel is coming up on 50 years old…
Use of the personal computer evolved, people wanted easy sharing, collaboration and data security without needing an IT department to support them. Cloud based computing filled that void and large organisations like Google reproduced popular personal computing applications like Excel and built them for the cloud. Google sheets is one such application and was born in around 2006 as part of Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
The Spreadsheet Is Now Ubiquitous
Lotus 1-2-3, Excel and Google Sheets have added more and more features to their spreadsheets applications over time. Spreadsheets are used everywhere, in nearly every industry. Anywhere something happens more than once and needs recording, and someone hasn’t written a specific software application to deal with it, there’s probably a spreadsheet involved.
The supply chain for the build of a Rolls-Royce aerospace engine? The planners use spreadsheets to collaborate and update statuses. I know, I’ve worked with them. I’ve not come across an industry from manufacturing to finance that doesn’t use spreadsheets somewhere.
This is no doubt because….
Spreadsheets are user friendly. It doesn’t take a software engineer to understand how to visualize, organize and calculate information from large sets of data. A basic knowledge of how spreadsheets works can get you a long way in a lot of different industries.
They are flexible, spreadsheets work for any industry and knowledge of spreadsheets can be adapted to a vast number of uses. I’ve no doubt your local bakery uses them, and also… NASA.
Versatility is another key feature of the spreadsheet, you can track your habits in charts and graphs, record your gym sessions and also use them to analyze large complex scientific datasets.
With a little knowledge of scripting spreadsheets can be can be automated, fetch new data on a schedule and make your life simpler.
The list of uses is really mind boggling.
Learning how to make the most of all the features of a modern spreadsheet application is a very good use of time, and a great investment in yourself.