Almost) the Sam

In the talk I will describe a mild syntactic restriction concerning spreadsheets (created in e.g. MS Excel or OpenOffice), which turns them into a computing device almost equivalent to Parallel Random Access Machines. Under this restriction, columns and rows of spreadsheets correspond to to time and memory/processors of PRAM, respectively. I will also demonstrate that other variants of restrictions imposed on spreadsheet do not  behave so well. Finally, I will sketch some practical consequences of these results.