ABSTRACT
Spreadsheets are conventionally used for several purposes. At their simplest they are used to tabulate data that could be equally well represented as a table in a word or text processor. This leads into simple database applications, in which data in more than one table can be related and data can be sorted and searched. Spreadsheets also provide an alternative computational model intended to match the way some financial calculations (such as income tax) are done on paper, which was, I believe, the original motivation. This computational model spans the range from “interactive calculator” to “editdebug-execute” and parallels the way that Maple also spans this range. The introduction of spreadsheets into Maple adds algebraic capabilities to the list of spreadsheet applications.
