Supervised by:

Prof. Dr. João Alexandre Saraiva

Prof. Dr. Orlando Manuel Belo

Rui Alexandre Afonso Pereira

Querying SpreadSheets

Problem: Querying Spreadsheets

• Spreadsheets are generally used to store information• Much like database systems• Have no way to query what data they contain

• Attempts have been made to replicate traditional querying systems for spreadsheets• MS-Query• Google QUERY Function

Problem: Querying Spreadsheets

• Highly restrict user’s spreadsheet data• Requires data to be in a tabular format• Requires headers to be present (in first

row)• Column letters ≠ Column labels• Counter intuitive queries• Data evolution not supported

Proposed Solution: Example

Proposed Solution: Example

• Model-Driven spreadsheet representing orders, clients, and products

Proposed Solution: Example

• Spreadsheet data

Proposed Solution: Example

• Query: How much have we profited from each client?

Proposed Solution: Example

Google QUERY Function :

Denormalization

Proposed Solution: Example

• Google Query:

Google QUERY Function :

Proposed Solution: Example

• Proposed Query:

Proposed Solution:

Proposed Solution: Example

Proposed Solution:

Proposed Solution: Example

Results:

• Query: How much have we profited from each client?

Recap

Recap

• Take advantage of the powerful Google query engine while adding extra functionality

• Allow more humanized queries

• Have ClassSheets supported

• Automatically structure the data into the needed format

• Automatically deal with problems caused by denormalized data querying

Not to reinvent the wheel

Architecture

Architecture

Demonstration

Demonstration

Future Work

Future Work

• Incremental Denormalization

• Integration of ClassSheet Inference

• Spreadsheet Synchronization

• Empirical Evaluations

Publications

Publications

• QuerySheet: A Bidirectional Query Environment for Model-Driven Spreadsheets. Orlando Belo, Jácome Cunha, João Paulo Fernandes, Jorge Mendes, Rui Pereira and João Saraiva. In proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC’13), San Jose, CA, USA, September 15–19, 2013. IEEE Computer Society, Showpieces paper. (to appear) 

• Querying Model-Driven Spreadsheets, Jácome Cunha, João Paulo Fernandes, Jorge Mendes, Rui Pereira, João Saraiva. In proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC’13), San Jose, CA, USA , September 15–19, 2013. IEEE Computer Society. (to appear)

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