Reflections on Ch 5

A spreadsheet is a rectangular table or grid of information, often financial information. The word came from spread in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item text and graphics that covers two facing pages, extending across the center fold and treating the two pages as one large one. The compound word spreadsheet came to mean the format used to present bookkeeping ledgers with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect which were traditionally a spread across facing pages of a bound ledger book for keeping accounting records or on oversized sheets of paper ruled into rows and columns in that format and approximately twice as wide as ordinary paper. A spreadsheet program is designed to perform general computation tasks using spatial relationships rather than time as the primary organizing principle. Many programs designed to perform general computation use timing, the ordering of computational steps, as their primary way to organize a program. A well defined entry point is used to determine the first instructions, and all other instructions must be reachable from that point. In a spreadsheet, however, a set of cells is defined with a spatial relation to one another. It is often convenient to think of a spreadsheet as a mathematical graph, where the nodes are spreadsheet cells, and the edges are references to other cells specified in formulas. This is often called the dependency graph of the spreadsheet. References between cells can take advantage of spatial concepts such as relative position and absolute position, as well as named locations, to make the spreadsheet formulas easier to understand and manage.
The education environment has gain changing their current practices through spreadsheets. One prime example of how educators monitor their class progress in the learning environment. This program creates a changing process, by reducing the time the educator spends on preventing skills to be lost from not knowing the class weaknesses. This is one example of an educators making preventative time wasted, while becoming educationally responsible. These spreadsheets resource can be used in such a friendly to use inexpensive preserve that educators can also share ideas that can be concerted from a particular task or direction.