As Kimstu notes, reference to spreadsheets as something new that needs to be incorporated into the curricula may have confused me.
I wonder if I was ever taught how to read baseball box scores or player’s stats on the back of trading cards? Aren’t those a form of spreadsheet? Sure, I assume schools will teach kids how to make various forms of charts - which requires that they look at the rows and the columns. Pretty related to outlining a paper or reading/compiling a table of contents. And a close relative to graphs, bar/pie charts…
Thanks for reminding me of the horror that was Fortran punchcard decks! 
And I recall “debit left, credit right” from my accounting classes. But I imagine that might have referred to “ledgers” instead of spreadsheets. Is there a difference? I looked up “spreadsheet” and the first definitions seem to consistently refer to digital records. Is there something about digital records that needs to be taught? If spreadsheets are primarily digital, then I do not think it a horrible misreading to suspect one is referencing the most common software used to compile them.
My wife teaches Business Law at a community college. She constantly struggles to get her students to access primary sources, even if she provides them the specific address. But instead of opening a statute or regulation and reading it to get the answer, the fucking idiots instead simply type or speak into AI, and then hand in some nonsensical hallucinated answer.
The 4th grade teacher I spoke with yesterday said up to 1/2 of her students in a middl-upper middle class suburb could not read an analog clock.
I’m reminded of a book I read about Francis Beaufort, extolling the value of observing your surroundings. (Something I agree is of great value.) A professor described asking a roomful of students the length of a lunar cycle. He gave them various information including the earth and moon’s diameter, rotation, etc. The students all set to calculating and the professor observed (paraphrased), “Why do you need to calculate this. You have been alive for 15-20 years, and the moon has been a constant in the night sky. You’ve seen the moon go through its phases over and over. This is something you should just KNOW.”
You can use Excel, or Word, or Outlook as a ledger, but that’s not what they are.
A ledger is a bookeeping tool. A spreadsheet is an accounting tool.
Spreadsheets became a lot easier to use when you could type them in and print them out, but when I started they were penciled in, then inked in. Nobody knows when the first reporting and planning accounting was done, but at least the Egyptions.
I can be as pedantic as the next, but is this a distinction that matters much outside of the bookkeeping and accounting communities?
Not as pedantic as me! 
To wit: no, a ledger is not a “bookeeping” tool, it’s a bookkeeping tool. An Ecto-Containment Unit is a bookeeping tool. (Hee, I crack me up.)
I dunno, but are analog clocks important outside of people who use analog clocks?
I’ve never done any bookkeeping outside an abortive attempt as a 17yo at a university club, but when I was a board member of a registered organisation we got a spreadsheet at our meeting each month. They weren’t showing us the ledgers.
And when I was a trainee Engineer, spreadsheets were used to communicate between the Board and the Engineering divisions: neither side of that conversation were bookkeepers or accountants.
I’m not a prescriptive vocabularist, but since there is a difference we might as well acknowledge it.
I’m curious, as you seem insistent about it. Could you provide a link explaining the distinction you suggest?
My googling fails to readily support such distinction. In fact, the words ledger and spreadsheet, and bookkeeping and accounting seem to be used somewhat interchangeably.
But I thought you said spreadsheets are accounting tools.
What people are trying to convey to you is like, imagine you’ve never personally experienced a car before and people showed you photographs of cars and you went “Oh, I get it, cars are a place to store stuff!”. And like, yes, it’s possible to store stuff in cars and many people use them for that purpose amongst other things but you cannot fundamentally understand a car until you grasp the concept that it also moves.
At the same time, it’s also unclear for someone so unfamiliar with cars, if you can’t personally demonstrate a car to them, how to fully convey the concept of movement and how radically it transforms what a car is.
That’s what a lot of people are trying to convey to you, they get the sense that you understand the data input and output side of spreadsheets but you can’t really wrap your head around that it also does computation. A ledger is not smart, it merely records data and regurgitates data. Spreadsheets can embed smarts within the sheet itself.
It’s not an easy thing to convey when the understanding gap is so large which is why people are reaching towards broad based metaphors.
I think you are bringing a different thread into this one. But I may be mistaken.
My sole question here was one poster’s statement differentiating ledgers and spreadsheets, with one being for bookkeepers and the other for accountants. I was not disagreeing with them, merely seeking education. When that poster described “spreadsheets” being shared among - IIRC - board members and engineers, I do not believe they were suggesting that the computational tools were being passed around. Instead, I thought they were referring to “printouts.” Is such a printout properly called a spreadsheet? If not, what ought it be called?
I’m confident that I understand what spreadsheets are (both computational and printed out.) Pretty sure I have a good idea as to what a ledger is as well. But if you wish to discuss it further, or think I retain ignorance on that topic which needs to be fought, perhaps a different thread might be appropriate.
I was unsure why that distinction was being brought into this discussion of clocks. When I tried to google the difference between ledgers and spreadsheets, the first responses - including AI, tended to say, “ledgers are an accounting tool…” Which seemed inconsistent with that poster’s statement.
I do not know where that poster is located. Perhaps the definitions and distinctions reflect societal/language differences.
Fwiw, when i share a “spreadsheet”, i am, in fact, sharing the computational tool, with the expectation that the recipient might check my work or poke around and do a “what if” or look at the underlying data from a different perspective. If I’m just sharing a printout, i probably say I’m sharing “slides” or “exhibits”. This is a change in language from 50 years ago when spreadsheets were pieces of paper.
Do young bookkeepers and accountants even learn how to keep a ledger or other… books? I want to say I still see the occasional small business owner messing around with journals?
Lol, fifty years ago is more recent than you young’uns think! 
Batch processed spreadsheet programs began to be developed in the 1960s, and spreadsheet software was a recognized thing by 1976.
I picked my date carefully. When i was a young actuary, there were still stacks of giant green paper spreadsheets in the room where we kept important records. And also, no one used them any more, because those records had become computerized. In 1976, if you referred to a spreadsheet in a business context, it probably was one of those green sheets. You’d say “visicalc” or something if you were referring to software.
Cool. That surprises me somewhat. In my line of work, it is generally customary to share pdfs, to avoid recipients making changes which may be incorrect, unwanted, etc. Generally important to ensure that everyone is working off the same ur-material, rather than numerous different versions.
I wonder if there is a terminology distinction between spreadsheet “makers”, and everyone else. I’m pretty confident that I have been handed budgets, proposals, representations of databases, and had all of those pieces of paper called spreadsheets.
I tend to do very little work with data/#s/$. What I do, I generally do in a Word doc. Sure - nowhere near as good of a tool, and requires extra effort to create a lesser product. But given my personal needs/wants, the product and process are adequate, and any shortcomings well offset the effort that would be required for me to learn a new software - and relearn it when I needed to use it months/years later.
I would imagine that it is not at all unusual for a small business owner or organization treasurer to keep some form of books - if only a check register. Not sure what criteria a system would need to exhibit to be considered a “ledger.” My wife conducts the annual audits for a nonprofit, and one recurring issue is the treasurer’s refusal to keep such records.
Again, my sole question concerned the definitions/distinctions between ledgers and spreadsheets, and the specification that they were used by different professions. I personally do not believe there is a clear, universally agreed upon distinction.
Interesting–when I’ve been handed papers with budgets etc., I think folks have said things like, “This is a printout of the budget spreadsheet.” More often people just refer to the paper according to its function: “Here’s the monthly budget.” I’d be taken aback if someone referred to the paper as the spreadsheet itself.
That’s definitely true in some cases. Our massive student data spreadsheet draws from multiple databases to keep all the relevant info in one place. The top several rows contain advanced filtering functions and are editable, but the rows containing student data are view-only for most users. So I can set it up to show how all fifth graders performed on their math end-of-grade exam in third grade, sorted by percentile scores and then by third-grade teacher; but I can’t change an individual kid’s score.
Perhaps they do say “printout of budget spreadsheet” as opposed to simply “spreadsheet.” Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps I mishear them since I (incorrectly?) have not internalized that the word spreadsheet is only used with respect to the computational program, and not for the product.
My guess is that the non-professionals I have interacted with have been inexact in their verbiage. I also suppose I fail to internally acknowledge the distinction between a “spreadsheet” or a “database.” If I produce or see a representation of data, I expect I would likely incorrectly refer to all such representations as spreadsheets. (Or, as you suggest, “the budget”, “my workload”, a proposed “schedule” or “itinerary”, our band’s “setlists”, my golfing “stats”…). I am not aware of single instance in which an inexact designation of such material caused any confusion or inconvenience.
Yes, you’re using Word as a ledger product (in the sense of the person in this thread, not the widespread common usage of the term) which is to store and represent data. Usually, changing one sentence it Word, you would not expect other sentences to change in other parts of the program. If you wanted to change Bob to Mary, for example, you would have to do a find & replace for all instances of the word. If you then wanted to change all the pronouns to match, it would generally require you to reread the entire doc and situationally change each pronoun manually.
A spreadsheet on the other hand, you receive it knowing that the changing of any one cell could change an arbitrary number of other cells, depending on how the spreadsheet is programmed. You could get a spreadsheet that predicts the profit & loss of a restaurant next month and modify say, what if the cost of beef went up by $3 instead of $2 and, instead of manually chasing that change throughout the entire sheet and doing mental math and changing numbers one by one, the spreadsheet would do it automatically based on the formula in the cells.
Thanks. Believe me - I do know that.
Even those old paper spreadsheets had calculations embedded in them. It’s just that now, the calculations are done automatically, rather than by hand (which is, admittedly, a very big deal).
But the problem with teaching kids to use spreadsheets is that spreadsheets are used in so many different ways, that you could have ten different uses that don’t overlap in what features you use. Thinking back on some of the ways I’ve used spreadsheets, sometimes all that matters is that there’s a grid to put passive things in, sometimes all that matters is that you can sort it by the values of various columns, sometimes it’s for gradesheets that contain some calculations, sometimes it’s budgets that contain completely different calculations, sometimes it’s Euler method solutions to differential equations, sometimes the data isn’t calculated at all, but I’m using data visualization tools, etc. You need to find some specific tasks to show students, and they need to be tasks that the students are actually interested in.
We were told that original records like primary gradesheets, and lab notebooks, should always be ink on paper, because computer files can be changed.