Worksheet

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A worksheet is a piece of paper, often preprinted in a way designed to help organize material for learning or clear understanding. Students in a school may have "fill-in-the-blank" sheets of questions, diagrams or maps to help them with their exercises. Students will often use worksheets to review what has been taught in class. K-12 Educators often create worksheets [1] for students on a daily basis.

In accounting a worksheet often refers to a loose leaf piece of stationery from a columnar pad, as opposed to one that has been bound into a physical ledger book. From this the term was extended to designate a single two-dimensional array of data within a computerized spreadsheet program.

In the Microsoft spreadsheet program Excel, a single document is known as a "workbook" and by default each workbook contains three arrays or "worksheets." One advantage of such programs is that they can contain formulas so that if one cell value is changed, the entire document is automatically updated, based on those formulas. Analysts, investors, and accountants track a company's financial statements, balance sheets, and other data on worksheets. Worksheets can be made with Microsoft Office Excel and other formula based software. More sophisticated database programs may display data from many tables as a "view."

Common types of worksheets used in business include financial statements such as profit and loss reports or "pro forma financials" as part of a business plan.