The spreadsheet application is among the most widely used computing tools in the modern society. It provides great usability and usefulness, and it easily enables a non-programmer to perform programminglike tasks in a visual tabular "pen and paper" approach. However, due to its mono-directional dataflow, spreadsheets are mostly limited to bookkeeping-like applications. This paper shows how the spreadsheet computing paradigm is extended to break through this limitation for solving constraint satisfaction problems. We present an enhanced spreadsheet system where finite-domain constraint solving is well supported in a visual environment. A spreadsheet-specific constraint language is constructed for general users to specify constraints among data cells in a declarative and scalable way. The new spreadsheet system significantly simplifies the development of many constraint-based applications using a visual tabular interface. Examples are given to illustrate the usability and usefulness of the extended spreadsheet paradigm.
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