Publication

Bidirectional spreadsheet formulas

Bibliographic Details
Summary:	Bidirectional transformations have potential applications in a vast number of computer science domains. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, are widely used for developing business applications, but their formulas are unidirectional, in the sense that their result can not be edited and propagated back to their input cells. In this paper, we interpret such formulas as a well-known class of bidirectional transformations that go by the name of lenses. Being aimed at users that are not proficient with programming languages, we devote particular attention to the seamless embedding of the proposed bidirectional mechanism with the typical workflow of spreadsheet environments, allowing users to have a fine control and understanding of the behavior of the derived backward transformations.
Main Authors:	Pacheco, Hugo
Other Authors:	Macedo, Nuno Filipe Moreira; Cunha, Alcino; Sousa, Nuno Miguel Rocha de
Subject:	Bidirectional transformation
Year:	2014
Country:	Portugal
Document type:	conference paper
Access type:	open access
Associated institution:	Universidade do Minho
Language:	English
Origin:	RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho

Description
Summary:	Bidirectional transformations have potential applications in a vast number of computer science domains. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, are widely used for developing business applications, but their formulas are unidirectional, in the sense that their result can not be edited and propagated back to their input cells. In this paper, we interpret such formulas as a well-known class of bidirectional transformations that go by the name of lenses. Being aimed at users that are not proficient with programming languages, we devote particular attention to the seamless embedding of the proposed bidirectional mechanism with the typical workflow of spreadsheet environments, allowing users to have a fine control and understanding of the behavior of the derived backward transformations.