A Genstat spreadsheet provides a way of visibly displaying and manipulating your data. You can create a blank spreadsheet and enter data via the keyboard, copy and paste data from another spreadsheet program, or open a spreadsheet created with another program such as Quattro, Excel or a .csv file. You can also save spreadsheets in other file formats, allowing you to share your data with colleagues who don’t use Genstat.
In Genstat, data are stored in different types of data structures, such as scalars, variates, factors and matrices. You can create specific types of spreadsheets, such as such as a table, which is a data structure that stores a multi-dimensional array of numbers. A vector spreadsheet, such as that shown below, can contain columns of texts (text strings prefixed by 
), variates (lists of numbers) and factors (groups or categories prefixed by 
).
You can have multiple spreadsheets contained together within a single workbook. Each spreadsheet is contained on a separate page within the workbook and has a named tab displayed at the top.
You can have more than one book or spreadsheet open at a time. The Spread menu commands on the menu bar act on the current spreadsheet within the active book. If you load data from the same data structure into more than one spreadsheet (in the same book or in different books) a separate copy of the data will be maintained in each spreadsheet. In this situation caution must be taken so that you only update Genstat from the appropriate copy of data (see Synchronizing Spreadsheet Data with the Genstat Server for more information).
There are a wide range of functions in Genstat for manipulating data within a spreadsheet. These include sorting rows and columns, using filters, and stacking and unstacking columns. You can access all these functions from the Spread menu. You can quickly access the most common manipulation commands by right-clicking your spreadsheet and selecting them from the shortcut menu.
 |
 |
| Spread menu | Right-click shortcut menu |