Where did the humble spreadsheet come from

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Spreadsheets have become a part of our everyday life, especially in the business world where they are used to store data for everything from staff details, absences and holidays as well as more complex information for stock control and pricing purposes. With the invention of PDF to Excel converters from companies like PDFTABLES information that is stored in a PDF format can now be easily converted across to an excel spreadsheet. That means that the time that would originally have been spent transcribing the information can not be spent analysing, editing and reporting on it.

Spreadsheets of a kind have been used for thousands of years with the Ancient Egyptians keeping written records of accounting transactions and traders recording items that had been sold. It was during the 20th Century that this practice was revoluntised into what we know today as a result of the development and then commercial manufacturing of computers.

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It was Harvard Business School and Daniel Bricklin back in 1978 that created a program for use with home computers that could store data and make simple calculations. Since these early days this technology has been expanded on until Excel was created and this continues to be improved time and time again.

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