FlashRelate: extracting relational data from semi-structured spreadsheets using examples

With hundreds of millions of users, spreadsheets are one of the most important end-user applications. Spreadsheets are easy to use and allow users great flexibility in storing data. This flexibility comes at a price: users often treat spreadsheets as a poor man’s database, leading to creative solutions for storing high-dimensional data. The trouble arises when users need to answer queries with their data. Data manipulation tools make strong assumptions about data layouts and cannot read these ad-hoc databases. Converting data into the appropriate layout requires programming skills or a major investment in manual reformatting. The effect is that a vast amount of real-world data is “locked-in” to a proliferation of one-off formats. We introduce FLASHRELATE, a synthesis engine that lets ordinary users extract structured relational data from spreadsheets without programming. Instead, users extract data by supplying examples of output relational tuples. FLASHRELATE uses these examp...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Daniel W. Barowy, Sumit Gulwani, Ted Hart, Benjamin G. Zorn
• Keywords: PLDI 2015, Programming Languages