Editing Spreadsheet (section)

==== Autoplan/Autotab spreadsheet programming language ====
In 1968, three former employees from the [[General Electric]] computer company headquartered in [[Phoenix, Arizona]] set out to start their own [[software development house]]. A. Leroy Ellison, Harry N. Cantrell, and Russell E. Edwards found themselves doing a large number of calculations when making tables for the business plans that they were presenting to venture capitalists. They decided to save themselves a lot of effort and wrote a computer program that produced their tables for them. This program, originally conceived as a simple utility for their personal use, would turn out to be the first software product offered by the company that would become known as [[Capex Corporation]]. "AutoPlan" ran on GE's [[Time-sharing]] service; afterward, a version that ran on [[IBM mainframe]]s was introduced under the name ''AutoTab''. ([[National CSS]] offered a similar product, CSSTAB, which had a moderate timesharing user base by the early 1970s. A major application was opinion research tabulation.)

AutoPlan/AutoTab was not a [[WYSIWYG]] [[interactive]] spreadsheet program, it was a simple scripting language for spreadsheets. The user defined the names and labels for the rows and columns, then the formulas that defined each row or column. In 1975, Autotab-II was advertised as extending the original to a maximum of "''1,500 rows and columns, combined in any proportion the user requires...''"<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=PPeM_JUhUqEC&dq=autotab-iI&pg=PA19 "'Autotab' Update Extends Former Matrix Size Limits"], 28 May 1975, p19, Computerworld</ref>

GE Information Services, which operated the time-sharing service, also launched its own spreadsheet system, Financial Analysis Language (FAL), circa 1974.  It was later supplemented by an additional spreadsheet language, TABOL,<ref>{{Cite journal|date=August 1983|title=COMPANY HIGHLIGHT: GENERAL ELECTRIC INFORMATION SERVICES COMPANY|url=https://archive.org/details/VAP-FtoGcompany|journal=INPUT Vendor Analysis Program|publisher=INPUT|quote=TABOL Database Manager (TDM), an enhancement to the TABOL financial analysis language, was also introduced in August 1982}}</ref><ref name="Enterprise1982">{{cite journal|date=30 August 1982|title=Package of Features Added to Mark III|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mlHBOATYlCcC&pg=PA46|journal=Computerworld|publisher=IDG Enterprise|pages=46}}</ref> which was developed by an independent author, Oliver Vellacott in the UK.  Both FAL and TABOL were integrated with GEIS's database system, DMS.