You can follow loan repayments or compare the benefits of different mortgages. You can analyse the weather patterns in your area, perform classroom or meeting room timetabling, assess the performance of students in a class, create invoices, and much, much more. The great thing for beginners is that most spreadsheet programs come with a swag of pre-designed solutions which have all the basic layouts and formulae worked out for you. Finding your way around Considering there are dozens of spreadsheet programs on the market, it s a tribute to Bricklin and Frankston s original design that almost all of them look pretty much the same and work in similar ways. While you ll find different features, twists and approaches in the various spreadsheets, if you get to know one you ll have a flying start in using almost any other spreadsheet available.
All spreadsheets basically consist of a grid of cells .
The columns are labelled across the top, usually from A to Z, and then from AA to AZ and so on. The rows are numbered down the side. Even simple spreadsheet programs let you have at least 256 columns and at least that many rows. Each cell in the spreadsheet can be uniquely identified by its cell address , which is the intersection of the column and row. For example, the first cell in column A is called A1.