At the simplest level, you can create a data structure for a spreadsheet in Java using a simple 2D array. However, this approach leaves a great deal to be desired. Ideally, a spreadsheet data structure should be able to efficiently resize, insert, and delete entire rows and columns, and these operations are computationally expensive in a Java array, requiring Java to rebuild the entire data structure from scratch behind the scenes each time such an operation is performed. Instead, you should use something a bit more sophisticated: a linked list of linked lists. This will allow the insertion and removal of rows and columns as well as the resizing of the table to happen much more quickly. However, it will come with a small performance cost when it comes time to access specific cells of the spreadsheet out of turn. public class Spreadsheet { } The basic data structure will be a LinkedList of rows containing a LinkedList of columns. Though a simple 2D array would be simpler to implement, it would also be much slower for many common spreadsheet operations, especially inserting and deleting rows. This simply ensures that we start with at least a single row and column.
