How do spreadsheets help businesses?
Henry Morales
Published Feb 09, 2026
Companies use spreadsheets to model and manipulate data sets, create graphical visualizations, and inform future planning, and decision making. With popular spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and alternatives from LibreOffice and GoogleDocs, businesses of any size can put spreadsheets to good use.
What are 3 popular spreadsheet programs?
Popular spreadsheet software applications
- Microsoft Excel. Introduced in the late 1980s, Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular and well-known spreadsheet software programs.
- Google Sheets.
- Airtable.
- Apache OpenOffice.
- Handsontable.
- Sheetgo.
- Smartsheet.
- Zoho Sheet.
How does a spreadsheets help employees in their work?
Not only can spreadsheets perform basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they also make available many financial, scientific and statistical mathematical functions as well. In addition, you can print your work or save it as a spreadsheet or workbook file for reference or later use.
How do you create a collaborative spreadsheet?
Set up a shared workbook
- Click the Review tab.
- Click Share Workbook in the Changes group.
- On the Editing tab, click to select the Allow changes by more than one user at the same time.
- In the Save As dialog box, save the shared workbook on a network location where other users can gain access to it.
What is the easiest spreadsheet?
Google Docs Spreadsheet Google Docs is probably the most easily manageable alternative to Excel. It looks similar to Excel’s layout and has pretty much the same features, except that it’s free for all Google account owners (if you have a Gmail account, you also have access to Google Docs).
What are spreadsheets best used for?
The three most common general uses for spreadsheet software are to create budgets, produce graphs and charts, and for storing and sorting data. Within business spreadsheet software is used to forecast future performance, calculate tax, completing basic payroll, producing charts and calculating revenues.
