.. Copyright (C) Google, Runestone Interactive LLC This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Introduction ============ Spreadsheets are a very powerful and widely-used tool. Spreadsheet softwares can generate graphs, do calculations extremely quickly, and even predict the future using statistics! This section introduces you to the basics of spreadsheets, and walks through a few illustrative examples. There are multiple spreadsheet softwares and the one we will focus on in this textbook is Google Sheets. While functionality may differ slightly across platforms, the core concepts and syntaxes are the same. In this course, whenever sheets are mentioned, it is in reference to Google Sheets, which is pictured below with example `student data`_. .. image:: figures/sheet_example.png :align: center :alt: Spreadsheet with example student data of name, height, hair color. .. _student data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c6q8T-4U3EUHnBtXWGvspgUNRFjradkwlgchJAO_W_4/edit?usp=sharing