Data services in your spreadsheet!

ABSTRACT

End-user programmers---the 45 million of them, as estimated for 2001 in US alone [7]---routinely use spreadsheet to visualize, manipulate, and analyze data. Thanks to this environment, they can build applications that solve their daily problems. Even building a report can be seen as programming an application that takes corporate data as input and outputs a presentation. To build this application, spreadsheet users have to import data and place them in spreadsheet cells, highlight the important pieces, compute maybe some aggregates, add a chart or two. If well done, this application will be used each time data are updated to effortlessly produce a fresh report.

REFERENCES

• 1: Excel Services Overview. Microsoft Corp., 2006.
• 2: G. Alonso et al. Web Services - Concepts, Architectures and Application. Springer-Verlag, 2004.
• 3: B. Brauer. Next evolution of data integration into microsoft excel. Technical report, StrikeIron Inc., 2006.
• 4: Michael Carey, Data delivery in a service-oriented world: the BEA aquaLogic data services platform, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 27-29, 2006, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1142473.1142551]
• 5: Alon Y. Halevy , Naveen Ashish , Dina Bitton , Michael Carey , Denise Draper , Jeff Pollock , Arnon Rosenthal , Vishal Sikka, Enterprise information integration: successes, challenges and controversies, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 14-16, 2005, Baltimore, Maryland [doi>10.1145/1066157.1066246]
• 6: F. Rice. Creating XML mappings in excel 2003. Technical report, Microsoft Corp., 2005.
• 7: Christopher Scaffidi , Mary Shaw , Brad Myers, Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, p.207-214, September 20-24, 2005 [doi>10.1109/VLHCC.2005.34]
• 8: Next-generation data programming: Service data objects. Technical report, IBM, BEA, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.1 Office Automation
          Subjects: Spreadsheets

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services