Tabularis Formatus: Predictive Formatting for Tables

TL;DR

TaFo is a neuro-symbolic system that automatically generates predictive conditional formatting rules for tables, improving user experience by making table formatting more accurate, diverse, and automated without requiring user input.

Contribution

Introduces TaFo, a novel neuro-symbolic approach that learns value-based formatting rules for tables, surpassing existing methods in accuracy and automation.

Findings

TaFo outperforms existing systems by 15.6%-26.5% in rule matching accuracy.

It generates more diverse and complete formatting suggestions.

The system effectively learns both rule triggers and visual properties without user input.

Abstract

Spreadsheet manipulation software are widely used for data management and analysis of tabular data, yet the creation of conditional formatting (CF) rules remains a complex task requiring technical knowledge and experience with specific platforms. In this paper we present TaFo, a neuro-symbolic approach to generating CF suggestions for tables, addressing common challenges such as user unawareness, difficulty in rule creation, and inadequate user interfaces. TaFo takes inspiration from component based synthesis systems and extends them with semantic knowledge of language models and a diversity preserving rule ranking.Unlike previous methods focused on structural formatting, TaFo uniquely incorporates value-based formatting, automatically learning both the rule trigger and the associated visual formatting properties for CF rules. By removing the dependency on user specification used by existing techniques in the form of formatted examples or natural language instruction, TaFo makes formatting completely predictive and automated for the user. To evaluate TaFo, we use a corpus of 1.8 Million public workbooks with CF and manual formatting. We compare TaFo against a diverse set of symbolic and neural systems designed for or adapted for the task of table formatting. Our results show that TaFo generates more accurate, diverse and complete formatting suggestions than current systems and outperforms these by 15.6\%--26.5\% on matching user added ground truth rules in tables.