Extending Spreadsheets to Support Seamless Navigation at Scale

Spreadsheets are one of the most popular tools for ad-hoc exploration and analysis of data. Despite that, exploring and analyzing spreadsheet datasets that span more than a few screens via operations such as scrolling or issuing formulae, is often overwhelming for end-users. Users easily lose context as they explore the data via scrolling and suffer from cognitive and mechanical burdens while issuing formulae on data spanning multiple screens. We propose integrating a navigation plug-in with spreadsheets to support the seamless exploration of large datasets that are increasingly the norm. Our interface, NOAH, developed using lessons from classical overview+detail interfaces, embeds a multi-granularity zoomable overview alongside the spreadsheet. Users can employ the overview to explore the data at various granularities. Furthermore, they can issue formulae over subsets of data without performing cumbersome scrolling or range selection operations, enabling users to gain a high or low-level perspective of the spreadsheet data. NOAH preserves spreadsheet semantics and look and feel, while introducing such enhancements. Our user study demonstrates that NOAH makes it more intuitive, easier, and faster to navigate spreadsheet data compared to traditional spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, for a variety of navigational tasks; participants made 2.5× fewer mistakes in NOAH than in Excel while being twice as fast in completing the tasks.