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Explaining spreadsheets with spreadsheets (short paper)

Published: 07 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Based on the concept of explanation sheets, we present an approach to make spreadsheets easier to understand and thus easier to use and maintain. We identify the notion of explanation soundness and show that explanation sheets which conform to simple rules of formula coverage provide sound explanations. We also present a practical evaluation of explanation sheets based on samples drawn from widely used spreadsheet corpora and based on a small user study.
In addition to supporting spreadsheet understanding and maintenance, our work on explanation sheets has also uncovered several general principles of explanation languages that can help guide the design of explanations for other programming and domain-specific languages.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)A user model to directly compare two unmodified interfaces: a study of including errors and error corrections in a cognitive user modelArtificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing10.1017/S089006042300015X37Online publication date: 2-Jan-2024

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 53, Issue 9
GPCE '18
September 2018
214 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/3393934
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    GPCE 2018: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences
    November 2018
    214 pages
    ISBN:9781450360456
    DOI:10.1145/3278122
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 April 2020
Published in SIGPLAN Volume 53, Issue 9

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Author Tags

  1. Explanation Principles
  2. Software Understanding

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  • Article

Funding Sources

  • Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
  • Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A user model to directly compare two unmodified interfaces: a study of including errors and error corrections in a cognitive user modelArtificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing10.1017/S089006042300015X37Online publication date: 2-Jan-2024

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