Spreadsheets are a really useful tool for handling lots of figures. They help us look for patterns in what are often big and unwieldy sets of figures. They can be used to provoke lots of questions and allow pupils to become quite sophisticated handlers of statistics. Very often you can devise an ICT lesson based on spreadsheets on relatively small amounts of data. Pupils can also collectively construct a spreadsheet. E.g. in groups pupils are given one street from census returns and the information they are asked to find is put on to the spreadsheet by one of the group.