Spreadsheet History
National Spreadsheet Day is celebrated on this date each year.
What is October 17?
The symbol you must type first to begin a formula in Excel.
What is = (equals sign)?
This formula finds the average of a range of numbers.
What is AVERAGE?
Excel’s columns go all the way to this last column letter.
What is XFD?
Dallas Park Maintenance staff log their work in this software, which often exports data into spreadsheets for reports.
What is Cartegraph?
This spreadsheet software helped make the IBM PC a business machine in the 1980s.
What is Lotus 1-2-3?
This Excel feature allows you to quickly summarize and analyze large amounts of data.
What is a PivotTable?
This function returns the largest value in a set of numbers.
What is MAX?
This is the maximum number of rows in an Excel worksheet.
What is 1,048,576?
Spreadsheets help track this annual City process that sets staffing, projects, and resources for the year.
What is the fiscal year budget?
The year Microsoft Excel was first introduced.
What is 1985?
The keyboard shortcut for copying a selected cell.
What is Ctrl + C?
This function counts only the numeric entries in a range.
What is COUNT?
This is the shortcut key combination to insert a new worksheet tab.
What is Shift + F11?
City performance dashboards pull from spreadsheets to track how quickly departments respond to this type of public service request system.
What is 311 (Dallas 311 Service Requests)?
The first electronic spreadsheet program, released in 1979 for the Apple II.
What is VisiCalc?
This function adds the values in a range of cells.
What is SUM?
This function looks up a value in the first column of a table and returns a value in the same row.
What is VLOOKUP?
Before spreadsheets, companies used this paper-based tool to track data.
What is a ledger?
To ensure transparency, Dallas publishes budget and financial data online in open-data spreadsheets through this public portal.
What is Dallas Open Data (data.dallascityhall.com)?
This software suite, launched by Google in 2006, allowed users to create spreadsheets online collaboratively.
What is Google Sheets?
This type of reference (like $A$1) doesn’t change when copied to another cell.
What is an absolute reference?
The modern Excel function that replaced VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP for flexible lookups.
What is XLOOKUP?
This playful Microsoft Excel 97 Easter egg was a hidden flight simulator.
What is the Excel 97 flight simulator (or “Hall of Tortured Souls”)?
Dallas relies on spreadsheets to track property tax collections, which make up roughly this percentage of the City’s General Fund revenue.
What is about 50%?