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. Spreadsheets are sometimes described as flatfile programs. This means spreadsheets are files that consist of records of a single type and there is no embedded structure information governing the relationships of the records.