Related Worksheets

The Related Worksheets Application

Stereotypical Enterprise Database UI

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Rep

orts

Table viewRecord view

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Highly Domain-SpecificDatabase Applications

• Require large development efforts

• Have high training/support costs

• Put developers between data and users

• Seldom reach a high level of maturity

• Usually just a CRUD1 interface to some relational database

1 “Create, Read, Update, Delete”

Alternative

Spreadsheets• General-purpose data management UI,

widely used for database-style tasks• Large range of streamlined facilities for

interacting with any data in a grid• Sadly, spreadsheets lack features

essential to any relational database UI– Joins, managing one-to-many/many-to-many relationships– No dynamic views– Non-tabular views and layouts– Need better scaling, multiuser support

• Great it your database is single-table, single-user

One-to-Many/Many-to-ManyRelationships

See P.P. Chen’s "The Entity Relationship Model: Toward a Unified View of Data“(IBM 1976)

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App Builders

Desktop IDEs

Spreadsheets vs.Database App Builders (Access et. al.)

Spreadsheets• A mature, grand unified

idea for how to interact with data

• Limited strategies available for presenting data.

• Does not help you manage relationships between multiple tables of data

Access/FileMaker/etc.• Access to the full power

of relational databases

• Too technical interface• Often requires macro

programming• Requires you to design

and implement a new UI for every schema

Good

Bad











Good

Bad











Good

Bad

TheRelated Worksheets

System

A spreadsheet metaphor for plural relationships

A database with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships,accessed through a general-purpose, spreadsheet-like UI

“Related Worksheets” application at startup

Creating a new worksheet

After entering some simple, tabular data

1st New Concept: Data Types for Worksheet Columns

2nd New Concept: Array Types

3rd New Concept: Reference Types(“Each cell in this column refers to a row in a different worksheet”)

3rd New Concept: Reference TypesReference values are displayed recursively, as configured

by the user in the “Show/Hide Columns” tree





Select/deselect fields in the “Show/Hide Columns” tree,

change column widths, names



4th New Concept: Relationships are bidirectional

1


2


Teleport Feature(Press Ctrl+Space)

1

2


Result: The ability to keep track of one-to-many/many-to-manyrelationships from within a spreadsheet-like user interface

Array Columns and Cursor Movement

Related Work

Commercial Application Builders

• 4th Dimension• FileMaker• Microsoft Access• Intuit QuickBase• AppForge (Yang et al. ‘08)

• App2You(Kowalzcykowski et al. ‘09)

Spreadsheet systems• IceSheets (Whitmer ‘08)

• PrediCalc (Kassoff et al. ‘07)

Visual Query Languages• Query-by-Example

(Zloof ‘77)

• Pivot Tables• Tableau (Stolte et al. ‘02)

Related Work

Commercial Application Builders

• 4th Dimension• FileMaker• Microsoft Access• Intuit QuickBase• AppForge (Yang et al. ‘08)

• App2You(Kowalzcykowski et al. ‘09)

Spreadsheet systems• IceSheets (Whitmer ‘08)

• PrediCalc (Kassoff et al. ‘07)

Visual Query Languages• Query-by-Example

(Zloof ‘77)

• Pivot Tables• Tableau (Stolte et al. ‘02)

Related Work(Tree-Structured Views)

AppForge (Yang et al. ‘08) IceSheets (Whitmer ‘08)

App2You (Kowalzcykowski et al. ‘09)

UserStudy

User Study• Hypothesis: Excel-proficient users will be faster at

lookup (read-only) tasks on a database stored in normalized form in our system vs. Microsoft Excel

User Study• Mechanical Turk

• Remotely screen-recorded

• Lookup tasks on course catalog database in Excel vs. Related Worksheets (between-subjects)

• Initial qualification task on Excel only

User Study

Results:Demographics

Results: Correctness and Features Used

Results: Timing

p < 0.05 for Task 4 only

(41% faster)

Observations

• Possible learning costs, including search

• Benefit for complex join task

• Excel users (73%) use filtering heavily, sorting less so (7%)

• Related Worksheets users made use of the teleport feature

Conclusion• Spreadsheets unsuitable as database with multiple

tables, plural relationships; otherwise great general tool• Enhance spreadsheet paradigm with

– Column type system: primitive types, array types, reference types

– Bidirectional hierarchical views of reference types

to handle plural relationships• User Study shows system usable without instruction,

sometimes faster than Excel (more study needed).

Acknowledgements• Thanks to Paul Grogan and Yod Watanaprakornkul for

their help designing and implementing the original prototype for this software!

A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural

Relationships in Structured Data

Eirik Bakke, David R. Karger, Robert C. MillerMIT CSAIL

Data & Analytics

Related Worksheets