SpreadMash: A Spreadsheet-Based Interactive Browsing and Analysis Tool for Data Services

Spreadsheets are one of the most popular end-users programming environment. Although spreadsheets provide an interactive interface for data manipulation and analysis, they are mostly used today in data entry mode and not as interactive browsing tool for data stored in underlying data sources. In this paper, we present SpreadMash, a high-level language and tool for interactive data browsing and analysis for data services. The key innovation of SpreadMash is a repository of application building blocks called data widgets that characterize various data importation and presentation patterns in spreadsheets. Data widgets enable the separation of end-users tasks (composing data widgets) from the tasks of data architects (creating data abstractions and data widgets). Through a series of examples we illustrate how tasks that would be challenging in existing environments are facilitated by SpreadMash. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.