Talk:Spreadsheet

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Tweaked things a bit to give a little more detail to the Pardo claim. Simply stating that they were inventors of the spreadsheet and Bricklin a "reinventor" seemed facile and a bit deceptive. The Pardo case probably ought to be mentioned on the "Software Patent" page eventually, too. get away from me godddd........... --204.38.148.67 13:44, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC) .knxv.nkxv;fsnkvnk/;/ksvjkbfjks

Contents 1 Sources? 2 Picture? 3 Vandalism 4 Rewrite 5 Further on Rewrite 6 Non-existant links 7 Spreadsheet Program File Formats 8 The list disease 9 Shortcomings 10 Screenshot substitution. 11 Turing complete? 12 screenshot 13 "Works Records System" 14 Confusing Image Description 15 AutoPlan/AutoTab copyright and reference

[edit] Sources?

What are the sources for the reports referred to in the paragraph beginning, "Educational research supports the use of spreadsheets both in K-12 and teacher education and in professional development"? --Claudine 02:00, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Picture?

Having a picture of a spreadsheet would be quite nice. Just my humble opinion.Its like a chinese takeaway, the gits dont understand you, you dont understand them! 80.219.15.170 06:45, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is a nice picture now :-) --220.253.22.122 11:08, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

I have just reverted a lot of vandalism on this article. More editors need to put this on their watchlists as there is a vandal who keeps removing sections from it. NSR (talk) 12:38, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrite

This is actually a pretty bad article. I may try to do some work on it.

• This article definitely needs attention/rewrite/wikifying. 131.111.223.43 00:17, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

It seems large sections of the article are also ripped [1]. I think I will try to beat this into shape later tonight, I kind of enjoy making messed up articles work again. :) -- Foofy 21:45, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks to all the editors, this article is much better now than what it was a couple of months ago; keep up the good work! 131.111.8.96 20:22, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Sarcasm?  :P I know, I know, I said I'd help, and haven't done anything yet. I'll make a fresh effort this week. --Foofy 21:24, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Further on Rewrite

This does indeed need a rewrite. The first paragraph relating a spreadsheet to newpaper spreads is off the mark. The term relates to the accountant's grand work sheet which was referred to as the spreadsheet.

This dates from the days when accounting was primarily a manual computational occupation. Information was stored manually in handwriting in many journals or ledgers. When doing a balance for a period it was difficult to access all the relevant information by going back and forth to these sources. The solution was a spreadsheet on which all these source could be copied for proper reference and computation. The spreadsheet was considered a ~work~ sheet and errors and erasures were expected. This is NOT the case for entries in a journal or ledger. (Significant changes in a journal or ledger was a cause for concern.) Upon completing such a spreadsheet the accountant would turn to the task of posting all the outcomes of the spreadsheet and creating a summary sheet of the these outcomes.

I am not an accountant and so my jargon and description might not be accurate in minute detail. I did take accounting 101 in about 1960 and that's how it was taught and done then. I suggest that the etymology of spreadsheet be struck unless it can be verified as accurate.

A little further commentary...

I suggest doing the organization of the article portion on history a little differently. I suggest doing the history as a history of the development of ~features~ of the spreadsheet program and separate out the marketing, legal, and other issues of the products. For example, saying that VisiCalc made no successful answer to 123 belies the history and ignores the legal issues that led to the company's troubles. These things are irrelevant to the topic spreadsheet, IMO. They are relevant to the history of the market struggle between various companies' competing products.

More relevant was that early spreadsheet had limitations on labels, number formats, editability, number of rows, number of columns, and such-like limitations. There were no functions to speak of. The sparse matrix array was a break through yet to be found. These kinds of issues in the history would be more appropriate to the history than the product and market struggles. Three-D, pivot tables, lookup tables, and charting from table data would be more relevant historically. Begs 19:46, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Non-existant links

Shuan, why did you add links to articles that don't exist? -- Foofy 22:28, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Spreadsheet Program File Formats

I am interested in reading an article about the various spreadsheet document file formats. For example, Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program and its file format appends the extension ".xls" to its respective file names. Other programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 also have their formats. In comparison to word processing documents, there are programs with their own standards. Microsoft Word for example appends ".doc" to its files and has a format that corresponds to it. WordPerfect uses its own system, and so on. Within the "word processing" realm, there are these special formats for individual programs, but there are also additional formats which could be interpreted as being "universal" such as plain text files ".txt" and Rich Text Format ".rtf" which can work on any word processor. Is there (or are there) similar "standard" formats which can be universally used between spreadsheet programs as there seems to be for word processing programs? If so, it would be nice to have it mentioned either in this article, or in another article on this topic. I am completely clueless on the topic, so I don't even know where to start other than by placing this comment on this discussion board. -- Michael Karazim 2006-01-06 01:52:46 UTC

Suggest looking into the comma seperated or tab delimitted formats192.189.236.20 16:48, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

The problem is the dependency of cells on formulas/functions, for which you would have a hard time coming up with a "standard". Otherwise, just the cell-data itself is indeed reliably transfered in either comma- or tab-delimited format. 209.92.136.131 16:54, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Excel can save spreadsheets in XML format; and OpenOfficeOrg saves its files in a zipped XML format. MeekMark 02:09, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The list disease

Whats with the enormous list of Spreadsheet apps? More than half link to articles that don't exist. --Foofy 04:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

I've nuked the list because there's already a link to a seperate one. --Foofy 04:16, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Shortcomings

There seems to be a growing backlash against spreadsheets lately. See Phillip Howard's article Managing Spreadsheets for an example. In the interest of balance, I figured some of the shortcomings of spreadsheets should be mentioned in this article. Thalter 16:08, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure some of these shortcomings don't apply to all spreadsheet apps. I know Actuate has some products that solve these problems. --Foofy 18:13, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Screenshot substitution.

I am changing the screenshot from MS Excel to OpenOffice.org. The reason is twofold:

Firstly, under the fair use licensing tag of the MS Word image, it states that the image may be used for identification of and critical commentary on the software in question. Using the image to illustrate and example of a type of software does not meet the stated requirement.

Secondly, according to Wikipedia's fair use policy, fair use images shouldn't be used where free alternatives are available.

-Seidenstud 04:02, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

That's a good idea, but I think the image you replaced it with is also "fair use". It has Mac OS X graphics in it. - James Foster 11:19, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Turing complete?

Does anyone have a citation for this? It's a pretty provacative claim; the article doesn't go into detail (and neither does Turing completeness) and I'd be interested in reading more. I'm thinking that the typical spreadsheet would have difficulty achieving Turing completeness since formulas can't update state (i.e. change the values of other cells) -- wouldn't this be necessary to simulate a Turing machine? Tmdean 21:04, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I thought about this some more, and I can see now how you could simulate a TM with a spreadsheet. I made a simple mock-up of the idea here: [2]. I'm not sure if I would consider spreadsheets Turing-complete because user intervention is required if not enough tape or iterations are represented in the worksheet, but I can understand one someone might make the argument for Turing-completeness. Tmdean 04:34, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

From the article: "Most spreadsheets allow iterative recalculation in the presence of these cyclic dependencies, which can be either directly controlled by a user or which stop when threshold conditions are reached." I've been Googling as hard as I can and I can't find any information on using cyclic dependencies in this way. Does anyone have a citation? Looks like this passage has been in the article since the begining. Tmdean 05:44, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I think merely the spreadsheet cannot be considered as Turing Complete. Nearly all spreadsheets have recalculation limits. Recalculation controlled by a user is NOT part of a "computation". As a result, a spreadsheet can only manage a finite amount of data (number of cells times maximum number of recalculations). Hence, there is no way a Turing machine of arbitrary size can be reduced to a spreadsheet. Since Wikipedia is not a place for original research, such a bold claim without citation should be removed. --Alan Tam 11:14, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I've removed the passages in question from this page and from Turing completeness. If anyone has any citation on using cyclic dependencies to achieve iteration in spreadsheets I'd definitely like to hear about it -- but unfortunately I can't seem to find any relevent information on anything related to this sort of thing. Of course, you have to give some leeway and consider more of a theoretical model of a spreadsheet rather than a real-world implementation when considering Turing-completeness. Any implementation of any programming language is actually not Turing-complete (of course) because of the limit on memory. Tmdean 23:24, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] screenshot

The current screenshot (showing OO calc on mac) is fine in its way, but I am still not entirely happy with it. The main problem is that the current screenshot does not show what spreadsheets are about. It shows what you can do on OO calc -- put graphics, pictures, insert dates, times, numbers in different format etc., but it just looks like a random collecton of objects/random numbers placed at random on a rectangular grid. You don't know what these numbers are, what is the graph (the labels just say "row 2", "row 20" etc.), and what the pretty picture and the dates etc. are supposed to mean. Someone should upload a screenshot showing what you can actually do on a spreadsheet -- for example a calculation of expenses, or salaries, or something like that, that would be understandable to a general reader and would show the practical side of spreadsheets. 131.111.8.97 16:13, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Using a screenshot I created. Emily 20:44, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! That is indeed better!! -- 131.111.8.99 22:12, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Works Records System"

The history section was pruned for a complete lack of external citations supporting the claims of the text. The information was just re-added, again without citation. While I am sure this information is probably true, it has to be backed up with solid references per Wikipedia's core policies (specifically WP:V). Please add them asap. Thanks! Kuru ^talk 02:50, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Confusing Image Description

The image description for Visicalc says : "Screenshot of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet.", however there are two other software products mentioned before Visicalc and have the word spreadsheet in their description. Perhaps a better image description would be required ? Or something more clear ?

[edit] AutoPlan/AutoTab copyright and reference

The text for this section was lifted (with minor changes) from my weblog without permission. Nevertheless, I'll let it stand. I hereby grant Wikipedia permission to use that section of text.

I would note, however, that my weblog article was written entirely from my personal remembrances and IMO is not up to the "reliable source" standards of Wikipedia. If it was, I would have included it in the Wikipedia article myself. Doug Pardee 22:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

A question out of curiosity: what's the URL of your blog? --Pkchan 02:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

fix it so i can understand it!!!!