2.4 Spreadsheets
In the preceding section of this chapter, we took a quick look at a number of communication-oriented applications. In this section, we examine spreadsheets, a problem-solving application, in detail. Learning about spreadsheets will help set the stage for our discussions of programming that follows later in the book.
Spreadsheet programs, such as Microsoft Excel, are general-purpose modeling tools that allow end-users to represent a problem as a collection of data items and the formulas that express the relationships between those items. Spreadsheets are used extensively in business, science, and engineering to visualize data (e.g., display sales figures in bar charts and pie charts), to analyze data (e.g., compute sums and averages), and to help answer “what if” type questions (e.g., “What will happen to profitability if wages are increased by 10%?” or “What will happened to payload capacity if overall vehicle mass can be reduced by 5%?”).
Many people consider spreadsheets to be the single most important application that led to the widespread adoption of PCs by businesses in the early 1980’s. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston developed the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, in 1978.[5] Prior to its development, data analysis was either done by hand – using pencil, paper, and a calculator – or required the use of special-purpose computer programs. These programs had to be designed, written, debugged, and tested – a time consuming and expensive process. With a spreadsheet, budgets and financial forecasts that took weeks to prepare the old fashioned way could be created in a few hours. This dramatic rise in productivity easily justified the cost of a computer and software.
Footnotes
[5] A brief history of spreadsheets is available at: http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html.