Spreadsheet visualisation to improve end-user understanding

  • Authors:
  • Daniel Ballinger;Robert Biddle;James Noble

  • Affiliations:
  • School Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6001, New Zealand;School Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6001, New Zealand;School Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6001, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • APVis '03 Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific symposium on Information visualisation - Volume 24
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

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.