Chemistry is an experimental science, and primarily lives in the laboratory. No book on spreadsheets will change that. However, many aspects of chemical analysis have significant quantitative, mathematical components, and many of these can be illustrated effectively using spreadsheets. At the same time, the spreadsheet is a very accessible tool for data analysis, an activity common to all of the physical sciences. This book emphasizes the use of spreadsheets in data analysis, while at the same time illustrating some of the underlying principles. The basic strength of spreadsheets was summarized by the name of the very first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, in that it facilitates the visualization of calculations, and thereby can help to make theory and data analysis come to life.

Spreadsheets are well-recognized for their near-immediate response to changes in their input parameters, for their ease in making graphs, for their open format and intuitive layout, and for their forgiving error-handling. For these reasons they are usually considered to be the most easily learned computer tools for numerical data analysis. Moreover, they are widely available, as they are often bundled with standard word processors.

Spreadsheets used to be far inferior to the so-called higher-level computer languages in terms of the mathematical manipulations they would support. In particular, numerical methods requiring iterations used to be awkward on a spreadsheet. Fortunately, this has changed with the introduction, in version 5 of Excel, of a macro language (Visual BASIC for Applications, or VBA) that allows the inclusion of standard computer code.