Perquimans: A Tool for Visualizing Patterns of Spreadsheet Function Combinations

Spreadsheet environments offer many functions to manipulate data, which users can combine into complex formulae. However, for both researchers and practitioners who want to study formulae to improve spreadsheet practices, anticipating these combinations is difficult. Therefore, we developed Perquimans, a tool that analyzes spreadsheet collections to visualize patterns of function combination as an interactive tree, representing both the most common and most anomalous patterns of formula construction and their contexts. Using spreadsheets from the Enron corpus, we conduct a case study and a user study to explore Perquimans' various applications, such as those in flexible smell detection and spreadsheet education.