Authors
Michael J. Coblenz, Andrew Ko, & Brad Myers
Abstract
There are many common errors in spreadsheets that traditional spreadsheet systems do not help users find.
This paper presents a statically-typed spreadsheet language that adds additional information about the objects that spreadsheet values represent.
By annotating values with both units and labels, users denote both the system of measurement in which the values are expressed as well as the properties of the objects to which the values refer. This information is used during computation to detect some invalid computations and allow users to identify properties of resulting values.
Sample
The label context forms the core of our research.
The structure of the label context reflects the observation that many real-world concepts and objects are hierarchical. Therefore, the label context is a tree, where each node is a particular concept.
Publication
2005, Institute for Software Research, Paper 778
