A spreadsheet is a tool that basically is a large grid of cells. Each cell can contain a number, a text-string or a formula. It originated within the business world as a way to build budgets, keep track of transactions and economics etc.
However, the structure of the spreadsheet also makes it a fairly good tool to use in RPG's. Especially for creating characters and other rule-bound artefacts.
To give you an example, a few years ago, I tried to challenge myself with building a spreadsheet to handle the vehicle creatoin rules in Gurps Vehicles. While the result was clumsy and not particulary elegant, it still helped me build a whole heap of nice vehicles (including a tank with a crew of 30).
One of my current projects is to build a character generator for the World of Darkness/ Storyteller-system by White Wolf. Due to copyright-infringement etc I can't publish it. I can, however, give you some hints and tips on how to build your own spreadsheet for use with roleplaying games.
While the core application will be Excell, I'll try to keep it as generic as possible (no scripts, for instance), so that you can do some migrating to Google Spreadsheet, Numbers or Open Office.
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