ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel, discusses advantages of spreadsheets in general and provides some historical details. A spreadsheet has the same organization in terms of horizontal and vertical lines, or rows and columns. The name spreadsheet, which has its origin in accounting, refers to this organization in rows and columns. A spreadsheet can be characterized as a combination of a word processor and a calculator operating in an environment organized in rows and columns. The idea of computer spreadsheets originated with Dan Bricklin who developed one in 1978 while working on his MBA at the Harvard Business School. In a computer lab environment the spreadsheet file for the workbook should normally be saved on the user’s floppy disk. The chapter deals only with the fundamental features of spreadsheets in general and Microsoft Excel in particular, in as far as they are needed to obtain a working knowledge of spreadsheets for an introduction to financial economics.