Robin Abraham, Martin Erwig, Steve Kollmansberger, Ethan Seifert
{"title":"Visual specifications of correct spreadsheets","authors":"Robin Abraham, Martin Erwig, Steve Kollmansberger, Ethan Seifert","doi":"10.1109/VLHCC.2005.70","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"We introduce a visual specification language for spreadsheets that allows the definition of spreadsheet templates. A spreadsheet generator can automatically create Excel spreadsheets from these templates together with customized update operations. It can be shown that spreadsheets created in this way are free from a large class of errors, such as reference, omission, and type errors. We present a formal definition of the visual language for templates and describe the process of generating spreadsheets from templates. In addition, we present an editor for templates and analyze the editor using the cognitive dimensions framework.","PeriodicalId":241986,"journal":{"name":"2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'05)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2005-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"64","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'05)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2005.70","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 64
Abstract
We introduce a visual specification language for spreadsheets that allows the definition of spreadsheet templates. A spreadsheet generator can automatically create Excel spreadsheets from these templates together with customized update operations. It can be shown that spreadsheets created in this way are free from a large class of errors, such as reference, omission, and type errors. We present a formal definition of the visual language for templates and describe the process of generating spreadsheets from templates. In addition, we present an editor for templates and analyze the editor using the cognitive dimensions framework.