Is Excel still a spreadsheet?

Simon HurstApr 09, 2015

Things were delightfully simple in the early days of spreadsheets. The distance from multi-column analysis paper to its on-screen equivalent was relatively small – just involving a whole lot less Tipp-Ex and doing the calculations for you. Very quickly, as we moved from VisiCalc to SuperCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, the capabilities of spreadsheets increased. As well as moving from single sheets to books of multiple pages, available calculations and functions became more extensive, macro and programming languages were included, and graphs and charts were introduced.

In spite of all these changes, the concept of 'spreadsheet' remained anchored in the idea of values in cells and formulas referencing cells to perform the required calculations.

It may be that it was the introduction of Lotus Improv in 1991 that originally redefined the idea of a spreadsheet. Improv broke the direct link between value and cell. Data was entered into cells, but calculations were performed in the background to summarise the values, before displaying the results in other cells. Excel formulas as we know them today were born.

From Lotus Improv to Excel PivotTables

Although Improv itself never really made a significant commercial impact, the concepts behind it surfaced within a few years in Microsoft Excel as PivotTables.

Like Improv, PivotTables relied on a break in the cell-based calculation chain. You could no longer look at a cell and be able to see where the value came from and what calculations and operations had been applied to it. Instead, the data was treated like a database table with the calculations being more akin to a database aggregate query than cell-based operations. One of the obvious results of this was the need to refresh a PivotTable to perform the underlying operations on updated data as opposed to the 'instant' recalculation of cell-based Excel formulas.

From peripheral feature to starring role

When PivotTables were first introduced in Excel in about 1994 it was very much a niche feature – useful for analysing certain types of data but far from being at the heart of general Excel functionality. Apart from anything else, the early implementation of PivotTables struggled to cope with the very large amounts of data that tend to be a feature of data analysis. This changed dramatically when Excel 2007 increased the number of cells in a worksheet from less than 17 million to over 17 billion.

Although PivotTable functionality had been improved steadily from 1994 to 2007, it was the introduction of the Power Pivot add-in in Excel 2010 that dramatically changed the concept and purpose of Excel. Power Pivot further extended the quantities of data that PivotTables could work with and also allowed data from an extended range of different sources, including Tables within an Excel spreadsheet, to be combined within the Power Pivot Data Model to feed PivotTable reports and charts.

No longer just a calculation engine, Excel was now a component of what Microsoft referred to as 'Self-service Business Intelligence'. Other features were introduced to bolster this aspect of Excel's use specifically. The Tables feature introduced in Excel 2007 had already provided a more structured way of dealing with data held within Excel. Graphics capabilities were extended with the introduction of in-cell charts or Sparklines in Excel 2010. Excel 2010 also saw the arrival of Slicers in PivotTables – allowing interactivity to be easily added to multiple reports and charts based on the same data set.

The trend continued in Excel 2013 and is continuing beyond. Clearly, the bulk of the development resources are being devoted to components of what is now the Power BI suite: Power Map and Power View for data visualisation and Power Query for acquiring the underlying data and manipulating it into the form required for use by the other Power BI elements.

Power Query

In fact, it is Power Query that could be the most significant of the Power BI features. Power Query infiltrates significant database functionality into the heart of Excel. The ease with which Excel Tables can be added to Power Query, and transformed in ways that would previously have required the use of Excel's more complex functions, could dramatically change the way that people go about structuring Excel models.

So, to answer the question posed in the title: no, Excel is no longer a spreadsheet. It can still function as a spreadsheet for those tasks that don't involve the use of structured data. However, for those tasks that do involve data analysis, the old 'calculations in cells' approach may no longer be relevant, being replaced by 'behind the scenes' database-style operations. Say goodbye to VLOOKUP() and SUMIFS().

If you want to learn how to carry out complex functions and analyse large data sets, then check out our Advanced Excel course.