Spreadsheet Visualisation to Improve End-user Understanding

CS-TR-02-23

Authors: Daniel Ballinger, Robert Biddle, James Noble, Elvis Software Design Research Group ~
Source: GZipped PostScript (247kb); Adobe PDF (301kb)


Spreadsheets are an extremely common form of end-user programming that have many applications, from calculating student marks to accounting for global multinationals. Ways of studying the structure of a spreadsheet itself are normally constrained to the tools provided in the spreadsheet software. This paper explores new ways to visualise spreadsheets in a manner that is independent of the program they were created in, explains the technology involved, and presents examples of the visualisations that can be produced. The techniques involved in reading the spreadsheets also facilitate larger scale analysis of spreadsheets for performing corpus analysis.

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