Spreadsheets are one of several major categories of software products that enable journalists to build and manipulate databases for greater understanding of the information contained in them. Gordon advocates access to a spreadsheet for every reporter in the newsroom and says each reporter should know how to use one. Because it's an inexpensive tool that will run on any computer and make your life easier almost any time you're presented with numerical information. That's because in a spreadsheet, each row is a database record and each column is a data field just as would be the case in a printed data table. Brant Houston, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and former managing director of the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, believes spreadsheets are an easy tool for all local government reporters to use.
City budgets are the most typical thing that spreadsheets can be used for.
Every reporter covering city hall in America should be getting the city hall budget on a little diskette, slapping it in to their laptop when the budget comes out, immediately rearranging the figures. Once you've imported the information, a simple calculation such as percent change from one year to the next, takes about five seconds to do. And there's the lead story for the next day's newspaper. Spreadsheets are the building blocks to understanding the creation of any database. Spreadsheets also often help translating data from one format to another that appears seemingly incompatible.