Using Spreadsheets for Prototyping

It’s been 40 years since electronic spreadsheets were invented. It might sound geeky, but there’s quite an interesting history behind it. Today, Microsoft Excel is basically a synonym for electronic spreadsheets. But the technology emerged in 1979, 6 years before Microsoft published the first release. It started with software pioneers Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston setting the base of VisiCalc. The spreadsheets went mainstream much later, in 1983, with the release of Lotus 1–2–3. There’s more to the story, but it’s not the purpose of this article. If you’re as fascinated as I am, I recommend this beautifully written article.

I will refer to this technology generically as spreadsheets, since I’m using both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel which, by the way, are not the only ones offering this capability. In fact, any spreadsheet software would work for the scope of this article.

A Powerful Communication Tool Between Business Folks & Developers

The main purpose of spreadsheets is to manage data, draw charts to describe it and compute calculations. However, there is another important category of use cases that I’ll be covering here, which no one really advertises. And that is the ability to use spreadsheets for prototyping software applications.

I found that the spreadsheet is probably the best tool to communicate requirements to software developers.