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Authors

Rui Pereira, Joao Saraiva, Jacome Cunha, & Joao Paulo Fernandes

Abstract

Spreadsheets are nowadays used in a variety of contexts, including in the manipulation of large and complex data. This data is stored in a large unstructured matrix, which is hard to understand and to manipulate. Recent research has been done to manipulate and query such unstructured data, namely by proposing different query approaches to spreadsheets.

In this paper we present an empirical study evaluating three recent query approaches to spreadsheets assessing their usage to query spreadsheets. The results of our study show that the end-users' productivity increases when using visual, model-driven queries are used.

Sample

Graphical query
Graphical query

We developed a graphical user interface for visual query construction. This visual interface, named Graphical-QuerySheet, hides syntax peculiarities and lets users choose attributes based on the spreadsheet's model.

Publication

2016, 31st ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, April

Full article

User-friendly spreadsheet querying: An empirical study