What is the difference between spreadsheet and electronic ledger?

An electronic ledger is more specific than an electronic spreadsheet. With electronic ledgers and things like accountancy, payroll and stock control applications, they are all designed with a very specific task in mind. So a payroll package is no use for stock control for example. In each of them some of the work is already done for you and you tailor them to your needs. Things are automated so you can concentrate on the data more and leave a lot of the processing to the applications.

An electronic ledger is limited to what it can do, as is a stock control, payroll and accounting package. An electronic spreadsheet starts off as being completely blank, leaving you a lot of work to do in order to get it doing what you want. However, you can use it to do a much wider range of tasks than any of the others, which is the big advantage. It would take a lot of work, but you can use an electronic spreadsheet to do things like ledgers, accounts, payroll and stock control.