Here is an excerpt from the new introduction I have written for my book Adventures in Spreadsheeting - Fun Things to do with Spreadsheets.

Why Should Young People Use Spreadsheets?

Spreadsheets are incredibly versatile bits of software. All sorts of people, young and old, have found all sorts of different ways of using them for their own purposes. (See box at right.) Personally speaking, I probably think of spreadsheets mainly as great problem-solving tools, especially if some mathematical calculations are needed to find a solution.

If you are a young person, however, the main reason you should be using spreadsheets right now is that they can be used as “Mindtools”. A mindtool is a bit of computer software that can be used like scaffolding around a building site, something outside our head that helps us to build on and reshape the ideas inside our head in our brain and our mind.

People have been using a whole variety of objects to help them think better for countless centuries now. Consider, for example, how notches in a piece of wood might be used to keep count of larger things, how a diagram can help you understand a complicated situation or how a hand-held calculator can actually do some of your thinking for you.

People throughout the ages have also adopted various tactics for problem-solving, like spreading out the parts of something neatly on a clear sheet or surface. From this point of view, spreadsheet programs and other computer software are simply more modern inventions for doing problem-solving, exploring ideas and situations, creating things, etc.

To choose and use spreadsheets well, however, you are going to have to know a fair bit about them.

Spreadsheets are an especially clever invention because they can be used as mindtools in basically three different, but often overlapping ways. Unlike many computer games, however, where the levels for beginner and expert players are often clearly stated, you have to look rather carefully to see how this works in spreadsheets.

Take a really good look at the screenshot shown below. Parts of it should look very familiar to you.

This screenshot was created when another author tested out a copy of VisiCalc downloaded from the Internet. VisiCalc was invented in the late 1970’s and is often described as “the first spreadsheet program”. There was certainly no software like it before for personal computers.

Take an especially close look at what you can see in the large rectangle at the bottom of the screenshot. This area is what is nowadays called the worksheet and then as now it contains a lot of smaller rectangles called cells. Each cell can be referred to individually by using the letters and numbers around the edge of the worksheet. The cell here containing 211, for example is called Cell B5.

Here is a little challenge for you to think about: How could you reproduce what you see in this worksheet?

Method 1

The very simplest way would be to type the various words and numbers into appropriate cells. That would be using the spreadsheet program like a piece of grid paper. (If you wanted to sound a bit more sophisticated, you might say a spreadsheet program can be used like a word processing program.)

The important thing to note here is that spreadsheets can be neat ways to record and display bits of information. This makes it easier to visualize what the information is about and the relationships between its parts. The grid pattern of the worksheet cells makes it particularly handy to record information in the form of tables. Nothing, however, would prevent you from using another arrangement for the data if that seemed better to do.

Method 2

What if the 211 total was missing? How would you put it there in B5? Again, you would not have to know much about spreadsheets to do this. You could either do the calculation (72+85+54) mentally or grab your hand-held calculator and add the numbers 72, 85 and 54.

Let me tell you something that quite a few teachers, intentionally or otherwise, keep “secret”.

Spreadsheet programs themselves can be used like a hand-held calculator. You could use the arrow-keys on the keyboard (or, these days, your mouse) to make B5 the “active” cell. In VisiCalc, you could then type in +72+85+54 and press Enter. The cell will act just like the window in a hand-held calculator and display 211.

(In more modern spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, you would be more likely to type = (an equals sign) rather than the first plus sign.)

Doing calculations using the original numbers can sometimes be handy, say, when you want to do the calculation only once but want to keep a record of which numbers were used.

Method 3

Lastly, note the line just above the worksheet. In modern spreadsheets this is called the Formula Bar. In this spreadsheet it reads

B5 (V) +B1+B2+B3

The feature is probably the main reason why Bricklin and Frankston, the inventers of VisiCalc, gave their program that name. It was short for “Visible Calculations”. Any calculation that has been placed in a cell will be displayed in the formula bar when that cell is chosen to be the active cell.

(In Microsoft Excel, if you hold down the Control key (Ctrl) and tap the Tilde Key (~) all the formulae in your spreadsheet will be revealed.)

The formula bar in this example shows the formula that was actually typed into B5 by the author who downloaded VisiCalc. It is an instruction or command to the computer to add together whatever numbers are in cells B1, B2 and B3.

There is a good reason why spreadsheeters usually refer to cell names like B1, B2 etc. rather that cell contents like 72, 85, etc. When the numbers in the cells referred to are changed, your computer will automatically use the new numbers to calculate a new answer.

In fact, you can look at the whole table in the worksheet as a set of commands. Just typing “Apples” into cell A1 and “72” into Cell B1, for example, tells the computer to remember that the cells in those positions contain these values. In other words, each time you use a spreadsheet, you can think of yourself as using it like a programming language.

Programming languages are software used to give computers a list of instructions to follow in a certain order. Some people even say that spreadsheets are a type of programming language.

Why do people think that spreadsheets are programming languages? This might be more obvious if we look at this program written in the computer language BASIC.

10 APPLES = 72

20 ORANGES = 85

30 BANANAS = 54

40 TOTAL = APPLES + ORANGES + BANANAS

50 PRINT "TOTAL ="; TOTAL

This would do much the same job as the spreadsheet, albeit not quite so conveniently. In both cases, for instance, changing any of the input numbers (72, 85 and 54) would result in a correct new value for the Total being calculated.

In most ready-made programs that you buy from a computer store, the “code” written in the programming language is usually well hidden. The store-bought program that might be the equivalent to this spreadsheet might look something like this:

Programs that do a rather specific task like this are called “Applications”. That is why you will hear spreadsheeters talking about creating “Spreadsheet Applications”. These are probably what they regard as the “bee’s knees” in spreadsheeting.

When we choose to use spreadsheets for our own purposes, it is probably because we can remember how we have used spreadsheets in the past to do similar tasks. I hope this little book of mine will provide you with many happy such memories.