Using and exploring hierarchical data in spreadsheets

Abstract

More and more data nowadays exist in hierarchical formats such as JSON due to the increasing popularity of web applications and web services. While many end-user systems support getting hierarchical data from databases without programming, they provide very little support for using hierarchical data beyond turning the data into a flat string or table. In this paper, we present a spreadsheet tool for using and exploring hierarchical datasets. We introduce novel interaction techniques and algorithms to manipulate and visualize hierarchical data in a spreadsheet using the data's relative hierarchical relationships with the data in its adjacent columns. Our tool leverages the data's structural information to support selecting, grouping, joining, sorting and filtering hierarchical data in spreadsheets. Our lab study showed that our tool helped spreadsheet users complete data exploration tasks nearly two times faster than using Excel and even outperform programmers in most tasks.