How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet – Lord.io
Discovered: May 21, 2026 20:14 (UTC) How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet – Lord.io <– love blog posts explaining algorithms like this!
QUOTE
This simple strategy of recalculating the whole document may sound wasteful, but it’s actually already better than VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software ever made, and the first so-called “killer app”, responsible for popularizing the Apple II. VisiCalc would repeatedly recalculate cells from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, sweeping over them again and again until none of them changed. Despite this “interesting” algorithm, VisiCalc remained the dominant spreadsheet software for four years. Its reign ended in 1983, when Lotus 1-2-3 swept the market with “natural-order recalculation”