Editing Spreadsheet (section)

==== IBM Financial Planning and Control System ====
The IBM Financial Planning and Control System was developed in 1976, by Brian Ingham at [[IBM]] Canada. It was implemented by IBM in at least 30 countries. It ran on an [[IBM mainframe]] and was the first application for [[financial planning]] developed with [[APL (programming language)|APL]] that completely hid the programming language from the end-user. Through IBM's [[VM operating system]], it was among the first programs to auto-update each copy of the [[application software|application]] as new versions were released. Users could specify simple mathematical relationships between rows and between columns. Compared to any contemporary alternatives, it could support very large spreadsheets. It loaded actual [[financial planning]] [[data]] drawn from the legacy batch system into each user's spreadsheet monthly. It was designed to optimize the power of APL through object kernels, increasing program efficiency by as much as 50 fold over traditional programming approaches.