A spreadsheet is a common productivity application that is used for laying out data in a grid and performing operations on the rows and columns of data.
The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc eventually led to a number of spreadsheet applications and the creation of the category, currently dominated by Microsoft’s proprietary spreadsheet application Excel that is part of Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice, the principle open source alternative, includes a spreadsheet as does KOffice (KSpread). For Gnome (or Windows), there is also Gnumeric.