An introduction to Spreadsheets!
Spreadsheets are an amazing piece of software which allows for charting, visualization and cleaning of large-scale tabular data. Spreadsheet software had been used extensively by business across all industry to distribute, disseminate and expand data to various stakeholders, be internal or external. This allows individuals to understand the data which they have been working on on a much deeper scale, which in turns improve their decision making as overall. To businesses, it would mean focusing on the things that truly make a difference to their customers, driven and proven by the trends which they see from their data.
Exploring with Google Sheets!
Google sheets is part of the Google Workspace office suite, a series of cloud tools which helps individuals and business collaborate via the cloud. Beyond being an online spreadsheet software, it is capable of handling automations through macros & AppScript, Google's own native platform for integrations with external services & systems with their Workspace tools.
Basics of Spreadsheets
Fundamentally, every spreadsheet program is designed to manipulate data in such a way that it makes it much easier to analyze outliers, observe trends, and to visualize the data in various ways to showcase even clearer relationships between different data points and variables.
A spreadsheet consists of 2 dimensional grid arrangement of data elements. Each of the data elements are labelled by their 'x' and 'y' coordinates, which are known to start from 1 and A. So for cell (0, 0), it is known to be A1. The y value comes first before the x value for spreadsheet software.
In general, spreadsheets are a way to represent data in 2 dimensional matrices, and allow for customized analysis on them to visualize trends and computations which would otherwise be too tedious to be done by hand and not as intuitive if done linearly as done in traditional mathematical programming languages like MATLAB.
Given these properties, spreadsheet software provides a powerful way to manipulate data through formulas, filtering & sorting and plotting data directly to charts & graphs.