Practical Free Alternatives to Commercial Software

© Steve Oualline and Grace Oualline 2018

Steve Oualline and Grace OuallinePractical Free Alternatives to Commercial Softwarehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3075-6_5

5. Working with Spreadsheets in LibreOffice Calc

Steve Oualline¹  and Grace Oualline¹

(1)

San Diego, California, USA

 

In the 1970s a fellow by the name of Dan Bricklin was at Harvard watching a professor teach finance. The professor had written a grid of numbers on the blackboard and was explaining some sort of financial model. When he changed a number, he had to erase and recalculate all the numbers that depended on it.

Dan thought that it would be nice to write a program that did that automatically, and the first spreadsheet, called VisiCalc , was born. In 1979 it became available for ...