History

The first paper to outline the concept of an electronic spreadsheet. Subsequent work resulted in the implementation of computerized spreadsheets on mainframe systems.

Rene Pardo and Remy Landau created the first commercial electronic spreadsheet called LANPAR. The name is also a mix of the surnames of the originators. It introduced the idea of forward referencing and natural order evaluation.

VisiCalc was a smash hit spreadsheet application for Apple II, one of the very first personal computers. The name is a shortening of Visible Calculation. It was the first spreadsheet application to have WYSIWYG editing capabilities and introduced many UI design innovations which were then adopted in later software becoming the prototypical spreadsheet example.

Multiplan was developed by Microsoft as a competitor to VisiCalc. It was eventually replaced by Excel. It used R1C1 addressing instead of the A1 addressing which was present in VisiCalc.

Popular spreadsheet application from Lotus that took over VisiCalc. Offered charting and graphics capabalities. It allowed cell naming and macros.

Boeing Calc was a spreadsheet application by the computer subsidiary of the aviation company Boeing. It was the first application to feature the concept of a 3D spreadsheet where a single cell could house an entire spreadsheet.

Superseded Multiplan and became the industry standard for spreadsheet editing in 1990s till 2020s.

Improv attempted to re-imagine interaction design for spreadsheets. It introduced separation of concerns in using cells only for input and output of data and formulae and notes were separated into different domains.

Siag is a spreadsheet that has a full-blown programming language support inside it's environment.

Online spreadsheet application from Google. Features scripting capabilities.

Airtable is a cloud based spreadsheet + database application

An embeddable spreadsheet engine