Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a computer application for the computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form, developed as a computerized analog of the paper accounting worksheet, in which each cell of a table can hold numeric or text data or a formula that automatically calculates a value from other cells. Remy Landau and Rene Pardo, recent Harvard graduates, conceived and built LANPAR in the summer of 1969, the first electronic spreadsheet, running on mainframe and time-sharing computers; the patent office initially rejected their patent application as a purely mathematical invention, and Pardo and Landau won a landmark court case only after twelve years of appeals. VisiCalc, released in 1979, brought the electronic spreadsheet to microcomputers for the first time and became the killer application that helped drive early sales of the Apple II.