Think of a physical ledger book — the kind an accountant keeps. The whole book is one object you can carry, name, and save. Inside it are several pages, each ruled into a grid. On any page, you can point to a spot by saying "column D, row 5" and everyone knows exactly which box you mean. That box is where you write a number, a label, or a formula.
A spreadsheet works the same way, and the names map almost one-to-one onto that picture.
The workbook
A workbook is the entire spreadsheet file — the single thing you save on disk, email to someone, or open in Excel or Google Sheets. Its name is the file name you see, like marks.xlsx. When you double-click that file, you open the whole workbook, not just one page of it.
The worksheet
Inside the workbook are one or more worksheets (often just called sheets). Each worksheet is a single grid — one "page" of the ledger. A workbook might hold a sheet for each month, or one sheet for data and another for a summary. You move between them using the tabs along the bottom of the window.
The workbook is the container; the worksheet is the grid you actually type into.
Columns and rows
Every worksheet is a two-dimensional grid, and its two directions have fixed names:
- Columns run vertically (top to bottom) and are labelled with letters: A, B, C, … Z, then AA, AB, and onward.
- Rows run horizontally (left to right) and are labelled with numbers: 1, 2, 3, and onward.
So a column is identified by a letter, a row by a number. That is the whole labelling scheme.
The cell
Where a column and a row cross, you get a single box — a cell. This is the basic unit of the spreadsheet, the one place where data actually lives. Every value you type goes into some cell.
A cell is named by combining its column letter and row number, column first. The cell in column B, row 3, is written B3. This is called the cell's address or reference, and it is unique — no two cells in a worksheet share an address.
The hierarchy is: Workbook → Worksheet(s) → grid of Columns and Rows → Cell. A cell address is written as column letter followed by row number, e.g. C7 means column C, row 7.
Here is the nesting laid out plainly:
| Level | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---| …