What is spreadsheet software

Teach spreadsheet skills to make connections to the real world applications of mathematics. Spreadsheet skills allow students to organize, calculate, graph, and analyze data. These skills provide a critical foundation in preparation for future studies and the workplace.

Scientists need to be able to keep track of their results from experiments. They use spreadsheets to help them to analyse what happened with the experiment and also to predict what might happen if they were to change one variable. Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool you can use to create and format spreadsheets, create graphs to visually display data, write formulas to calculate mathematical equations, and analyze and share information to make more informed decisions.

The conditional formats are applied to the same cells on the other worksheets. ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip applies to Microsoft Excel , , , , , and Excel in Office In the receiving worksheet, click on the row number of the first row you want to copy to highlighting the complete row. Now click Paste. The row heights and contents are copied.

You can protect cells or whole rows or columns by highlighting the cells i. Select the row or rows that you want to change. On the Home tab, in the Cells group, click Format. Under Cell Size, click Row Height. In the Row height box, type the value that you want, and then click OK. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Term Paper What is spreadsheet software and examples?

This can be done by clicking on the cell. A spreadsheet can contain one or several worksheets tabs. In the picture above worksheet 3 is selected. Clicking on the plus-sign will add a new worksheet to the spreadsheet. The most common reason to use spreadsheets is to store and organize data, like revenue, payroll and accounting information.

A spreadsheet or worksheet is a file made of rows and columns that help sort, organize, and arrange data efficiently, and calculate numerical data. What makes a spreadsheet software program unique is its ability to calculate values using mathematical formulas and the data in cells. An example of how a spreadsheet may be utilized is creating an overview of your bank's balance.

Below is a basic example of what a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet looks like, with all the important features of a spreadsheet highlighted. In the above example, this spreadsheet is listing three different checks, the date, their description, and the value of each check.

Because the terms spreadsheet, workbook, and worksheet are so similar, there often is confusion when trying to understand their differences. When you open Microsoft Excel a spreadsheet program , you're opening a workbook. A workbook can contain one or more different worksheets that are accessed through the tabs at the bottom of the worksheet your currently viewing. What's often most confusing is that a worksheet is synonymous with a spreadsheet. In other words, a spreadsheet and worksheet mean the same thing.

However, most people only refer to the program as a spreadsheet program and the files it creates as spreadsheet files or worksheets. Today, Microsoft Excel is the most popular and widely used spreadsheet program, but there are also many alternatives.

Below is a list of spreadsheet programs used to create a spreadsheet. Although spreadsheets are most often used with anything containing numbers, the uses of a spreadsheet are almost endless. Below are some other popular uses of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are ideal for financial data, such as your checking account information, budgets, taxes, transactions, billing, invoices, receipts, forecasts, and any payment system.

Form templates can be created to handle inventory, evaluations, performance reviews, quizzes, time sheets, patient information, and surveys. Click the small plus button at the bottom of our workbook document:. Many files will not be this clean and may require cleanup. Governments regularly update CSV files on their servers. This may happen frequently with certain files such as election results.

In the previous example, you might have noticed the date and time columns display these strange numbers which should be dates and times of each crime. Raw cell data for a time value is the number of days since Jan 1, and may even be different when using Microsoft Excel.

We can easily adjust this by changing the cell format. Tables can frequently be imported directly from a Web page into a spreadsheet. Note: This example will tie into the next section on charts, so we use it for convenience.

However, we do not advocate using data from Wikipedia in any production sense. Always vet and corroborate data directly from the source when used in journalism. The third parameter is which table element we should find, in case there are multiple. Live data from Google finance can be imported into your spreadsheet.

The data updates automatically every time the spreadsheet is loaded. Quotes can have up to a 20 minute delay, which is common for financial data. The initials at the beginning of the parentheses are stock ticker symbols. You can find the symbol for any stock at Google Finance. The same function can be used to load historic data. With the spreadsheet on types of weapons used in homicides, for example, you could more easily see which weapons are most frequently used by ranking them from the highest number to the lowest number for any given year.

To do this, you first need to highlight the area of the spreadsheet that you want to sort. The highlighted area now includes the headings for the types of weapons used and then the numbers for each type of weapon for each year.

You also can select whether to sort that data in ascending order A — Z so the smallest number appears at the top of the sorted data, or descending order Z — A so the largest number appears at the top. A spreadsheet provides a lot of options for re-formatting the information being displayed. These are similar to the options in a word processing program like Microsoft Word or many other applications. They include:. Some of these options are available by selecting Format in the menu at the top and then picking one of the choices in the drop-down menu.

This tutorial was originally written by Paul Grabowicz for students in his Computer Assisted Reporting class, and later modified by Jeremy Rue for public use. I first learned how to use the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program many years ago using that book, which took a step by step approach based on how a journalist uses a spreadsheet. I tried to use the same approach with this tutorial. This content may not be republished in print or digital form without express written permission from Berkeley Advanced Media Institute.

Please see our Content Redistribution Policy. On your screen will appear a basic spreadsheet, divided into numbered rows and lettered columns. The rows and columns intersect to create small boxes, which are called cells. Each cell is identified by its column letter and row number. Thus the very first cell in the upper left-hand corner is called A1. In the image below, for example, cell D9 is highlighted. Setting the View Options You can select some settings to change the view of the spreadsheet or display toolbars you frequently use, such as the one for entering formulas to make calculations.

Entering Information in a Cell You enter information into a spreadsheet program by typing it into each of the cells. You can enter three different types of information into a cell: Numbers — so you then can perform mathematical calculations on them.

Text — to identify what the numbers in the columns and rows represent, usually by typing headings across the top of the columns or on the left edge of the rows Formulas — to perform calculations on the numbers in a column or a row of cells. To enter information into a cell, simply click on the cell and type in the information. Text Headings To enter text headings for the various columns and rows to identify them, follow the same procedure as you would with entering numbers.

Importing Data Into a Spreadsheet Many government agencies and private organizations provide data on their websites in a spreadsheet or other format that you can download onto your computer.

After a few seconds you should see a Google Docs spreadsheet that looks like this: This spreadsheet shows the number of murder victims in each year from to in five columns, with the columns labeled by year in cells B4 to F4.