Spreadsheet Day was created as a way of celebrating one of the most widely used computer-based tools and this year marks both the 15th occurrence of Spreadsheet Day and the 45th birthday of the spreadsheet itself. October 17th was selected because on that day in 1979 VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, was released for the Apple II computer.
Over the last 45 years, spreadsheets have proved their versatility and importance to both business and personal users. In today’s data-driven world spreadsheets help businesses to understand more about their operations and can be used to forecast future trends. Their ability to store formulas which can recalculate automatically means it is easy to produce complex calculations and then update values to see the impact in real time. Most spreadsheet tools now also include charts and graphs allowing us to visualise data rather than focus purely on the numbers.
The Infotex team have been discussing some of their favourite spreadsheet functionality. Built-in functions feature highly on the list with the VLOOKUP function a particular favourite. VLOOKUP allows you to search through a dataset for a value and then return another cell from the matching row. Honourable mentions go to the CONCATENATE function (or CONCAT in newer versions of Excel) allowing you to join together text either from referenced cells on the spreadsheet or text that you specify and DATEDIF which allows you to work out the number of years, months or days between two dates.
While Microsoft Excel may dominate the desktop market, with the comparatively recent dawn of cloud-based spreadsheets like Google Sheets the ability to collaborate with colleagues has grown massively with the ability to see real time updates made by collaborators from anywhere in the world. Google Sheets has some impressive functions of its own including IMPORTXML which can retrieve values from a webpage based on HTML tags.
Whilst we’re celebrating spreadsheets we also have to keep in mind times when they’ve been put to uses that maybe they weren’t originally intended for. One infamous example is during the early days of the Covid pandemic the use of an old Excel file format meant that records of test results were incomplete because the spreadsheet simply ran out of rows. More recently a “spreadsheet issue” was blamed for 6,500 votes being missed from the originally declared votes for the Putney constituency in the 2024 General Election (although the oversight didn’t change the overall winner).
Last year we looked at what to do if your spreadsheet has become unmanageable so if you find yourself with a spreadsheet that is stretching the limits of what they are capable of then do consider getting in touch to see how we can help out.
