Bibliography

History

Visicalc and after

• Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet (Dan Bricklin), 2010Video
• Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s interview to Boston Linux, 2023 Video
• Visicalc online (PCjs.org)
• Was VisiCalc the “first” spreadsheet? (Dan Bricklin), 1999 Article
• Real programmers don’t use spreadsheets (Rommert J. Casimir), 1984 Paper
• Interview with Bert Bruce, ex-Lotus, 2023 Video
• The Computer Chronicles - Spreadsheet Wars, 1988 Video
• Computer Software (Alan Kay), 1984 Paper

Post-Excel: critiques, analyses, premise for bean

• Pure Functional Programming in Excel (Felienne Hermans), 2017 Video

  Spreadsheets are code.

• Spreadsheet programming problems (Dr. Drang), 2013

• You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work (I mean it) (Daniel Lemire), 2016 Article

• Horror Stories (EuSpRIG) Article

• Spreadsheet Errors: What We Know. What We Think We Can Do. (Raymond R. Panko), 2000 Paper

• You Suck at Excel (Joel Spolsky), 2015 Talk

• How Trello is different (Joel Spolsky), 2012 Article

  Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

  Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

• PLSE Seminar Series: Emery Berger, “Saving the World from Spreadsheets” (Emery Berger), 2019 Talk

• Quartz guide to bad data (Quartz), 2015 Article

• Spreadsheets in Organizational Life - Paul Dourish (UCIBrenICS), 2017 Video

On End-User Programming

• The spreadsheet interface: A basis for end-user programming (Bonnie A. Nardi, James R. Miller, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories), 1991 Paper
• A Small Matter of Programming (Bonnie A Nardi), 1993 Book
• End User Programming – Alan Kay at Apple (Alan Kay), 1991 Video
• Direct Manipulation Interfaces, 1985 Paper
• The Whole Code Catalog, futureofcoding – Spreadsheets, 2019 Article
• Ink and Switch on End-user Programming (Szymon Kaliski, Adam Wiggins, James Lindenbaum), 2020 Article

Implementing a Spreadsheet

• Spreadsheet Implementation Technology: Basics and Extensions (Peter Sestoft), 2014 Book
• Implementing VisiCalc (Bob Frankston), 2003 Article
• How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet (Robert Lord), 2018 Article
• Quadratic, 2020
• Benchmarking Spreadsheet Systems (Sajjadur Rahman et al.), 2019 Paper

Cognitive Aspects and Learning

• Studying the Novice programmer (James Spohrer, E Soloway), 1986 Paper
• Can principles of cognition lower the barriers to programming? (Clayton Lewis, Gary Olson), 1987 Paper
• An ethnographic study of distributed problem solving in spreadsheet development (Bonnie Nardi, James Miller), 1990 Paper
• Twinkling lights and nested loops (Bonnie Nardi, James Miller), 1990 Paper
• Creating, comprehending and explaining spreadsheets (Hendry, D. G. and Green, T. R. G.), 1994 Paper
• Cognitive dimensions of programming notation (Alan F. Blackwell, TRG Green et al), 2001 Paper
• The “Physics” of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering (Daniel L. Moody), 2009 Paper
• A usable guide to cognitive dimensions (uxbooth.com), 2014 Article
• Deficiencies in Spreadsheets: A Mental Model Perspective (Bennett Kankuzi), 2015 Paper
• Data organization in spreadsheets (Karl W. Broman, Kara H. Woo), 2017 Paper
• The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (Paul Dourish), 2017 Book
• How do people learn to use spreadsheets? (Advait Sarkar, Andrew D. Gordon, Microsoft Research), 2018 Paper
• How would one invent hindu arabic numerals (Andy Matushchak, Micheal Nielsen), 2019 Article

Functions in spreadsheets

• Champagne Prototyping: A Research Technique for Early Evaluation of Complex End-User Programming Systems (Alan F. Blackwell, Margaret M. Burnett, Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research), 2001 Paper
• A User-Centred Approach to Functions in Excel (Simon Peyton Jones, Alan Blackwell, Margaret Burnett, Microsoft Research), 2004 Paper
• Elastic SDFs (Simon Peyton Jones, Advait Sarkar, Microsoft Research), 2017 Paper
• Microsoft Research at POPL 2021 (Andy Gordon et al.), 2021 Talk

Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience

• The Importance of Excel (James Kwak), 2013 Article
• It’s Freedom to Put Things Where My Mind Wants": Understanding and Improving the User Experience of Structuring Data in Spreadsheets (George Chalhoub, Advait Sarkar), 2022 Paper
• Human-Spreadsheet Interaction (Andrea Kohlhase), 2017 Paper
• Interview with Donald D. Chamberlin – SQL, XML, RDBMS history (IBM), 2001 Article
• Will Dynamic Arrays finally change the way Models are built? (Peter Bartholomew), 2019 Paper

Alternative ideas and proof of concepts

• A Relational Spreadsheet (Kevin Lynagh), 2023 Article
• Gradual Structuring: Evolving the Spreadsheet Paradigm for Expressiveness and Learnability (Gary Miller, Felienne Hermans, Robin Braun), 2016 Paper
• Breaking Out of the Cell: On The Benefits of a New Spreadsheet User-Interaction Paradigm (Ziv Hellman), 2001 Paper
• Sumwise: A Smarter Spreadsheet (Gary Miller), 2010 Paper
• Structuring Spreadsheets with the “Lish” Data Model (Alan Hall, Michel Wermelinger, Tony Hirst and Santi Phithakkitnukoon), 2018 Paper
• Activesheets - stream processing (Martin Hirzel), 2014 Paper
• Towards a Holistic Integration of Spreadsheets with Databases: A Scalable Storage Engine for Presentational Data Management (Mangesh Bendre, Vipul Venkataraman, Xinyan Zhou, Kevin Chang, Aditya Parameswaran), 2017 Paper
• Improving spreadsheet test practices (Felienne Hermans), 2015 Article

Provenance

• Where-Provenance for Bidirectional Editing in Spreadsheets (Jack Williams, Andrew D. Gordon), 2021 Paper
• Provenance for Database Transformations (Val Tannen), 2016 Video

Formula syntax

• XQuery Spec (Don Chamberlin), 2003 Paper
• Punctuation in XPath (Evan Lenz), 2011 Article

Tables & Spreadsheets

• Tables considered helpful (Daniel Gregoire), 2016 Video
• Tabular Abstraction, Editing, and Formatting (Xinxin Wang), 1999 Paper
• The interpretation of tables in texts (Matthew Hurst), 2000 Paper
• Students’ Spatial Structuring of 2D Arrays of Squares (Michael T. Battista, Douglas H. Clements, Judy Arnoff, Kathryn Battista, and Caroline Van Auken Borrow), 1998 Paper
• An Abstract Model for Tables (Xlnxin Wang, Derick Wood), 1993 Paper
• Transforming arbitrary tables into logical form with TARTAR (Aleksander Pivk et al.), 2007 Paper
• Table Identification and Reconstruction in Spreadsheets (Elvis Koci, Maik Thiele, et al), 2017 Paper
• Using Indentation in Tables (Excellent Ideas & Tips), 2018 Video
• Inferring Templates from Spreadsheets (Robin Abraham, Martin Erwig), 2007 Paper
• XLIndy: Interactive Recognition and Information Extraction in Spreadsheets, 2017 Paper
• Practical Typography on tables (Matthew Butterick) Article
• DeExcelarator: Annotation Tool (University of Dresden), 2018 Video
• Rule Based Spreadsheet Data Transformation from Arbitrary to Relational Tables (Alexey Shigarov, Andrey Mikhailov), 2017 Paper
• XVIZIT: Visualizing Cognitive Units in Spreadsheets (Karin Hodnigg, Martin Pinzger), 2015 Paper
• Table Meets LLM: Can Large Language Models Understand Structured Table Data? A Benchmark and Empirical Study (Yi Zhang et al.), 2024 Paper

Corpus

• Fuse: A Reproducible, Extendable, Internet-scale Corpus of Spreadsheets (Titus Barik, Kevin Lubick, Justin Smith, John Slankas, and Emerson Murphy-Hill), 2014 Paper
• Corpus of spreadsheet research papers (i-nth) Article