TableTalk: Scaffolding Spreadsheet Development with a Language Agent
Jenny T. Liang, Aayush Kumar, Yasharth Bajpai, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Chris Parnin, Arjun Radhakrishna, Ashish Tiwari, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Guastavo Soares

TL;DR
TableTalk is a language agent that scaffolds, guides, and incrementally builds spreadsheets, improving quality and reducing cognitive load for programmers by leveraging professional workflows and AI tools.
Contribution
We introduce TableTalk, a novel agentic system that enhances spreadsheet programming through structured scaffolding, flexible planning, and incremental construction based on empirical studies.
Findings
TableTalk increased spreadsheet quality and user preference by 2.3 times.
It reduced cognitive load and thinking time by 12.6%.
The system offers structured guidance aligned with professional workflows.
Abstract
Spreadsheet programming is challenging. Programmers use spreadsheet programming knowledge (e.g., formulas) and problem-solving skills to combine actions into complex tasks. Advancements in large language models have introduced language agents that observe, plan, and perform tasks, showing promise for spreadsheet creation. We present TableTalk, a spreadsheet programming agent embodying three design principles -- scaffolding, flexibility, and incrementality -- derived from studies with seven spreadsheet programmers and 85 Excel templates. TableTalk guides programmers through structured plans based on professional workflows, generating three potential next steps to adapt plans to programmer needs. It uses pre-defined tools to generate spreadsheet components and incrementally build spreadsheets. In a study with 20 programmers, TableTalk produced higher-quality spreadsheets 2.3 times more…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpreadsheets and End-User Computing
