Concept of Electronic Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is considered as a configuration of rows and columns. It can also be called a worksheet. Spreadsheets are used for calculating and comparing numerical and financial data.

The values in the spreadsheet can be either basic or derived. Basic values are independent values and the derived values are the outcome of any function or an arithmetic expression.

Spreadsheet applications are computer programs that allow the users to add and process data. One of the most widely used spreadsheet software that is used is Microsoft Excel.

A file in an excel sheet is referred to as a workbook and each workbook consists of worksheets where the data is entered for further processing.

The concept of spreadsheet can be understood with the following terminologies, which are as follows.

Label: Text or special characters are treated as labels for rows, columns or descriptive information. There is no way of treating the labels mathematically, i.e labels cannot be multiplied or subtracted, etc.

Formulas: Formula refers to a mathematical calculation that is performed on a set of cells. Formulas are represented with an equal sign at the start in the spreadsheet.

The arithmetic operations along with the complex nested conditional scenarios (like what if scenario) are also performed by the spreadsheets by following the order of mathematical expression rules.

Functions: Functions are special keywords that are entered into a cell with the objective of processing the data that is contained within the brackets.

Functions can be added directly into the formula bar. There are four parts of a function which are: (a) name of the function (b) purpose of the function (c) arguments needed by the function to carry on the assignment and (d) the result of the function.

Functions are a set of in-built formulas that start with an equal to sign. The most common functions in the spreadsheet are SUM (), AVERAGE (), etc.

This concludes our article on the topic of Concept of Electronic Spreadsheet, which is an important topic in Class 12 Accountancy for Commerce students. For more such interesting articles, stay tuned to BYJU’S.