A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet

Worksheet

A worksheet is a sheet of paper, or on a computer, on which problems are worked out or solved and answers recorded.-Education:Students in a school may have 'fill-in-the-blank' sheets of questions, diagrams, or maps to help them with their exercises...

. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric

Alphanumeric

Alphanumeric is a combination of alphabetic and numeric characters, and is used to describe the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits or a text constructed from this collection. There are either 36 or 62 alphanumeric characters. The alphanumeric character set consists of the numbers 0 to...

 text, numeric values or formulas. A formula

Formula

In mathematics, a formula is an entity constructed using the symbols and formation rules of a given logical language....

 defines how the content of that cell is to be calculated from the contents of any other cell (or combination of cells) each time any cell is updated.