User-friendly spreadsheet querying: An empirical study

Abstract

Spreadsheets are nowadays used in a variety of contexts, including in in manipulatin large and complex data. This data is stored in a large unstructured matrix, which is hard to understand and to manipulate. Recent research has been done to manipulate and query such unstructured data, namely by proposing different query approaches to spreadsheets. In this paper we present an empirical study evaluating three recent query approaches to spreadsheets assessing their usage to query spreadsheets. The results of our study show that the end-users' productivity increases when using visual, model-driven queries are used.