Gridlets: Reusing Spreadsheet Grids

Joharizadeh, Nima; Sarkar, Advait; Gordon, Andrew D.; Williams, Jack

doi:10.1145/3334480.3382806

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The distinguishing property of spreadsheets is that reuse includes formatting and layout, and is not limited to formula logic. Gridlets [12] are a high-level re-use abstraction for spreadsheets. In this work we give the first semantics of gridlets as a formula.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The gridlet concept [12] has been proposed but not implemented. Our observation is that spilling a range reference acts much like copy-paste, but lacks local modification.…”

Section: Extending Spreadsheets With Gridletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gridlets [12] are a high-level abstraction for re-use in spreadsheets based on the principle of live copy-paste-modify: a pasted region of a spreadsheet can be locally modified without severing the link to the source region. Changes to the source region propagate to the copy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The user may enter this formula either directly, or indirectly via some grid-based interface[12]; details of the user experience are beyond the scope of this paper.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled Arrays

Williams

Joharizadeh

Gordon

et al. 2020

Programming Languages and Systems

Self Cite

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We develop a theory for two recently-proposed spreadsheet mechanisms: gridlets allow for abstraction and reuse in spreadsheets, and build on spilled arrays, where an array value spills out of one cell into nearby cells. We present the first formal calculus of spreadsheets with spilled arrays. Since spilled arrays may collide, the semantics of spilling is an iterative process to determine which arrays spill successfully and which do not. Our first theorem is that this process converges deterministically. To model gridlets, we propose the grid calculus, a higher-order extension of our calculus of spilled arrays with primitives to treat spreadsheets as values. We define a semantics of gridlets as formulas in the grid calculus. Our second theorem shows the correctness of a remarkably direct encoding of the Abadi and Cardelli object calculus into the grid calculus. This result is the first rigorous analogy between spreadsheets and objects; it substantiates the intuition that gridlets are an object-oriented counterpart to functional programming extensions to spreadsheets, such as sheet-defined functions.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The gridlet concept [12] has been proposed but not implemented. Our observation is that spilling a range reference acts much like copy-paste, but lacks local modification.…”

Section: Extending Spreadsheets With Gridletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The user may enter this formula either directly, or indirectly via some grid-based interface[12]; details of the user experience are beyond the scope of this paper.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled Arrays

Williams

Joharizadeh

Gordon

et al. 2020

Programming Languages and Systems

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Gridlets are most useful when uniform edit is common, while copy/paste is useful for all other cases. 14 The idea of SDFs is interesting because it would allow the spreadsheet developer to define computations according to the modular design approach, which is well established in software development, without relying on other technologies, such as procedural and scripting languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SDFunc: Modular spreadsheet design with sheet‐defined functions in Microsoft Excel

Turk

2021

Softw Pract Exp

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The goal of the SDFunc tool is to enable spreadsheet developers to build their model computations in Microsoft Excel according to the modular design approach, that is, the separation of the functionalities into independent, interchangeable modules with interfaces that provide input and output elements. This concept has been theoretically developed in recent years and is known as sheet-defined functions in the literature. In this article, we are presenting our implementation of the tool and the evaluation steps that we took to make the tool interesting and suitable for the assessment of the modular approach in spreadsheet development by the industry, specifically within organizational and companies' settings where the spreadsheet developers and end-users involved in experiments expect to use a well-established spreadsheet platform. We also demonstrated that sheet-defined functions can be implemented by development tools already present in Microsoft Excel.

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End-user encounters with lambda abstraction in spreadsheets: Apollo’s bow or Achilles’ heel?

Sarkar

Ragavan

Williams

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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The value of computational abstractions to nonexpert end-user programmers is contentious. We study reactions to the LAMBDA function in Microsoft Excel, which enables users to define their own functions using the spreadsheet formula language, through a thematic analysis of nearly 2,700 comments posted on the Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube, and Microsoft Tech Community online forums. We find that computational abstractions are viewed both as helpful and harmful, that users encounter learning and understanding barriers to applying them, and that there are deficiencies and opportunities in tooling such as in formula editing, versioning, reuse and sharing. We find that the introduction of LAMBDA prompts new debate around whether spreadsheets are code, whether writing formulas can be considered programming, and whether spreadsheet users identify themselves as programmers.

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Gridlets: Reusing Spreadsheet Grids

Cited by 8 publications

References 8 publications

Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled Arrays

Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled Arrays

SDFunc: Modular spreadsheet design with sheet‐defined functions in Microsoft Excel

End-user encounters with lambda abstraction in spreadsheets: Apollo’s bow or Achilles’ heel?

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