A key feature of relational database applications is managing plural relationships—one-to-many and many-to-many—between entities. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, which lend themselves poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this project, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a screencast-based user study on 36 Mechanical Turk workers. First-time users of our software were able to solve lookup-type query tasks with the same or higher accuracy as subjects using Microsoft Excel, in one case 40% faster on average.

1. The Related Worksheets Application

2. Stereotypical Enterprise Database UI
Switchboard
Reports
Table view
Search form
Record view

3. Highly Domain-Specific
Database Applications
• Require large development efforts
• Have high training/support costs
• Put developers between data and users
• Seldom reach a high level of maturity
• Usually just a CRUD1 interface to some
relational database
1 “Create, Read, Update, Delete”

4. Alternative

5. Spreadsheets
• General-purpose data management UI,
widely used for database-style tasks
• Large range of streamlined facilities for
interacting with any data in a grid
• Sadly, spreadsheets lack features
essential to any relational database UI
– Joins, managing one-to-many/many-to-many relationships
– No dynamic views
– Non-tabular views and layouts
– Need better scaling, multiuser support
• Great it your database is single-table,
single-user

6. One-to-Many/Many-to-Many
Relationships
See P.P. Chen’s "The Entity Relationship Model: Toward a Unified View of Data“
(IBM 1976)

8. ?

9. App Builders
Desktop IDEs

10. Spreadsheets vs.
Database App Builders (Access et. al.)
Spreadsheets
• A mature, grand unified
idea for how to interact
with data
• Limited strategies
available for presenting
data.
• Does not help you
manage relationships
between multiple tables
of data
Access/FileMaker/etc.
• Access to the full power
of relational databases
• Too technical interface
• Often requires macro
programming
• Requires you to design
and implement a new UI
for every schema
Good
Bad

11. Spreadsheets vs.
Database App Builders (Access et. al.)
Spreadsheets
• A mature, grand unified
idea for how to interact
with data
• Limited strategies
available for presenting
data.
• Does not help you
manage relationships
between multiple tables
of data
Access/FileMaker/etc.
• Access to the full power
of relational databases
• Too technical interface
• Often requires macro
programming
• Requires you to design
and implement a new UI
for every schema
Good
Bad

12. Spreadsheets vs.
Database App Builders (Access et. al.)
Spreadsheets
• A mature, grand unified
idea for how to interact
with data
• Limited strategies
available for presenting
data.
• Does not help you
manage relationships
between multiple tables
of data
Access/FileMaker/etc.
• Access to the full power
of relational databases
• Too technical interface
• Often requires macro
programming
• Requires you to design
and implement a new UI
for every schema
Good
Bad

13. The
Related Worksheets
System
A spreadsheet metaphor for plural relationships

14. A database with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships,
accessed through a general-purpose, spreadsheet-like UI

15. “Related Worksheets” application at startup

16. Creating a new worksheet

17. After entering some simple, tabular data

18. 1st New Concept: Data Types for Worksheet Columns

19. 2nd New Concept: Array Types

20. 3rd New Concept: Reference Types
(“Each cell in this column refers to a row in a different worksheet”)

21. 3rd New Concept: Reference Types
Reference values are displayed recursively, as configured
by the user in the “Show/Hide Columns” tree

22. 3rd New Concept: Reference Types
Reference values are displayed recursively, as configured
by the user in the “Show/Hide Columns” tree

23. 3rd New Concept: Reference Types
Reference values are displayed recursively, as configured
by the user in the “Show/Hide Columns” tree

24. 3rd New Concept: Reference Types
Reference values are displayed recursively, as configured
by the user in the “Show/Hide Columns” tree
Select/deselect fields in the
“Show/Hide Columns” tree,
change column widths, names

25. 4th New Concept: Relationships are bidirectional

26. 4th New Concept: Relationships are bidirectional
1

27. 4th New Concept: Relationships are bidirectional
2

28. Teleport Feature
(Press Ctrl+Space)
1
2
4th New Concept: Relationships are bidirectional

29. Result: The ability to keep track of one-to-many/many-to-many
relationships from within a spreadsheet-like user interface

30. Array Columns and Cursor Movement

31. Related Work
Commercial Application
Builders
• 4th Dimension
• FileMaker
• Microsoft Access
• Intuit QuickBase
• AppForge (Yang et al. ‘08)
• App2You
(Kowalzcykowski et al. ‘09)
Spreadsheet systems
• IceSheets (Whitmer ‘08)
• PrediCalc (Kassoff et al. ‘07)
Visual Query Languages
• Query-by-Example
(Zloof ‘77)
• Pivot Tables
• Tableau (Stolte et al. ‘02)

32. Related Work
Commercial Application
Builders
• 4th Dimension
• FileMaker
• Microsoft Access
• Intuit QuickBase
• AppForge (Yang et al. ‘08)
• App2You
(Kowalzcykowski et al. ‘09)
Spreadsheet systems
• IceSheets (Whitmer ‘08)
• PrediCalc (Kassoff et al. ‘07)
Visual Query Languages
• Query-by-Example
(Zloof ‘77)
• Pivot Tables
• Tableau (Stolte et al. ‘02)

33. Related Work
(Tree-Structured Views)
AppForge (Yang et al. ‘08) IceSheets (Whitmer ‘08)
App2You (Kowalzcykowski et al. ‘09)

34. User
Study

35. User Study
• Hypothesis: Excel-proficient users will be faster at
lookup (read-only) tasks on a database stored in
normalized form in our system vs. Microsoft Excel

36. User Study
• Mechanical Turk
• Remotely screen-recorded
• Lookup tasks on course catalog database
in Excel vs. Related Worksheets
(between-subjects)
• Initial qualification task on Excel only

37. User Study

38. Results:
Demographics

39. Results: Correctness and Features Used

40. Results: Timing
p < 0.05 for
Task 4 only
(41% faster)

41. Observations
• Possible learning costs, including search
• Benefit for complex join task
• Excel users (73%) use filtering heavily,
sorting less so (7%)
• Related Worksheets users made use of
the teleport feature

42. Conclusion
• Spreadsheets unsuitable as database with multiple
tables, plural relationships; otherwise great general tool
• Enhance spreadsheet paradigm with
– Column type system: primitive types, array types, reference
types
– Bidirectional hierarchical views of reference types
to handle plural relationships
• User Study shows system usable without instruction,
sometimes faster than Excel (more study needed).
Acknowledgements
• Thanks to Paul Grogan and Yod Watanaprakornkul for
their help designing and implementing the original
prototype for this software!

43. A Spreadsheet-Based User
Interface for Managing Plural
Relationships in Structured Data
Eirik Bakke, David R. Karger, Robert C. Miller
MIT CSAIL