Needles in the 'Sheet'stack: Augmented Analytics to get Insights from Spreadsheets

TL;DR

This paper presents an augmented analytics approach for extracting insights from spreadsheets without prior schema knowledge, aiding users unfamiliar with database structures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for analyzing periodic spreadsheets to generate insights without schema or data knowledge, enhancing accessibility for non-expert users.

Findings

Enables insight extraction from spreadsheets without schema knowledge

Supports users without database expertise

Demonstrates effectiveness on real-world reports

Abstract

Business intelligence (BI) tools for database analytics have come a long way and nowadays also provide ready insights or visual query explorations, e.g. QuickInsights by Microsoft Power BI, SpotIQ by ThoughtSpot, Zenvisage, etc. In this demo, we focus on providing insights by examining periodic spreadsheets of different reports (aka views), without prior knowledge of the schema of the database or reports, or data information. Such a solution is targeted at users without the familiarity with the database schema or resources to conduct analytics in the contemporary way.