Now You're Thinking With Structures: A Concept for Structure-based Interactions with Spreadsheets
Patrick Koch

TL;DR
This paper proposes a structure-aware approach to enhance understanding and interaction with spreadsheets by inferring and visualizing structural information, aiming to improve user productivity and spreadsheet quality.
Contribution
It introduces a concept for structure-based interactions in spreadsheets, extending previous work with tools for structure inference, visualization, and proactive manipulation.
Findings
Implemented a structure inference and visualization tool
Enhanced spreadsheet interactions with structural information
Aims to improve user productivity and spreadsheet quality
Abstract
Spreadsheets are the go-to tool for computerized calculation and modelling, but are hard to comprehend and adapt after reaching a certain complexity. In general, cognition of complex systems is facilitated by having a higher order mental model of the system in question to work with. We therefore present a concept for structure-aware understanding of and interaction with spreadsheets that extends previous work on structure inference in the domain. Following this concept, structural information is used to enrich visualizations, reactively enhance traditional user actions, and provide tools to proactively alter the overall spreadsheet makeup instead of individual cells The intended systems should, in first approximation, not replace common spreadsheet tools, but provide an additional layer of functionality alongside the established interface. In ongoing work, we therefore implemented a…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSpreadsheets and End-User Computing · Statistics Education and Methodologies · Engineering Education and Pedagogy
