Editing Spreadsheet (section)

==== Automatic recalculation ====
A standard of spreadsheets since the 1980s, this optional feature eliminates the need to manually request the spreadsheet program to recalculate values (nowadays typically the default option unless specifically 'switched off' for large spreadsheets, usually to improve performance). Some earlier spreadsheets required a manual request to recalculate since the recalculation of large or complex spreadsheets often reduced data entry speed. Many modern spreadsheets still retain this option.

Recalculation generally requires that there are no [[circular dependency|circular dependencies]] in a spreadsheet. A [[dependency graph]] is a graph that has a vertex for each object to be updated, and an edge connecting two objects whenever one of them needs to be updated earlier than the other. Dependency graphs without circular dependencies form [[directed acyclic graph]]s, representations of partial orderings (in this case, across a spreadsheet) that can be relied upon to give a definite result.<ref>{{citation |mode=cs1 | last1=Al-Mutawa | first1=H. A. | last2=Dietrich | first2=J. | last3=Marsland | first3=S. | last4=McCartin | first4=C. | contribution=On the shape of circular dependencies in Java programs | doi=10.1109/ASWEC.2014.15 | pages=48–57 | publisher=IEEE | title=23rd Australian Software Engineering Conference | year=2014| isbn=978-1-4799-3149-1 | s2cid=17570052 }}</ref>