Dan Bricklin, an experienced software designer, was enrolled in the Harvard Business School. He quickly became tired of creating paper spreadsheets and calculating and recalculating figures for assignments in his accounting and finance classes.

Together with Bob Frankston, he developed a computer program to perform calculations automatically. This program was marketed in 1979 as VisiCalc for the Apple II PC and helped to make the Apple II the most popular PC at the time.

Louts 1-2-3 was the first major spreadsheet developed for IBM PCs by Michael Kapor in 1982. Since then, many popular spreadsheet programs for he IBM PC have appeared on the market including Quattro Pro by Borland in 1987, and Microsoft Excel.