Where-Provenance for Bidirectional Editing in Spreadsheets

We explore the idea of adding bidirectionality to spreadsheet formulas, so that editing the output can directly affect the input. We introduce portals: a portal is a value paired with its where-provenance, that is, one or more links to its origin. When a portal is the result of a formula in a cell,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Williams, Jack, Gordon, Andrew D.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
bidirectional editing
Portals
provenance
spreadsheets
User interfaces
Visualization
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:We explore the idea of adding bidirectionality to spreadsheet formulas, so that editing the output can directly affect the input. We introduce portals: a portal is a value paired with its where-provenance, that is, one or more links to its origin. When a portal is the result of a formula in a cell, that cell inherits the capability to edit the locations described by the provenance of the portal. The simplicity of portals makes them amenable to implementation in an existing spreadsheet system. We analyse the list of functions provided by a widely-used commercial spreadsheet system and find that many frequently used functions work with portals with no modification.
ISSN:1943-6106
DOI:10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576272