How does the self-contained spreadsheet differ from a commercial spreadsheet?
It contains only the functions most likely to be needed by students in the target courses. Thus, it cannot compute a depreciation schedule, but it can calculate such statistics as means, medians, variances, standard deviations, and regression lines. Its beauty lies in its simplicity for student use. Because this is only a partial implementation of Excel, it does not accept as input files that were saved in an Excel format by other spreadsheets, such as Quattro. Of course, the saved data can also be used directly in any commercial spreadsheet.
