A spreadsheet-based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data

Abstract

A key feature of relational database applications is managing plural relationships-one-to-many and many-to-many-between entities, be they customers and invoices, parts and suppliers, or meetings and conference rooms. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, a general and more familiar data management tool which, unfortunately, lends itself poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this thesis, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailormade relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a study involving 36 regular Excel users. First-time users of our software were able to solve most lookup-type query tasks without instruction, in one case 40% faster than on Excel.