Enhancing excel business tools with additional relational and recursive capabilities

This paper presents a new plug in that enriches spreadsheet capabilities mainly in what concerns its potential regarding relational queries and recursive computational processes. Currently some apparently trivial and useful queries can only be handled with the support of programming skills. Spreadsh...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ramos, P. (author)
Other Authors: Botelho, L. (author), Martins, A. (author)
Format: article
Language:eng
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10071/17063
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio.iscte-iul.pt:10071/17063
Description
Summary:This paper presents a new plug in that enriches spreadsheet capabilities mainly in what concerns its potential regarding relational queries and recursive computational processes. Currently some apparently trivial and useful queries can only be handled with the support of programming skills. Spreadsheet users with low computer science skills should have a natural and easy way to handle those queries within the spreadsheet, without relying on external programming (e.g., VBA). The tool we have developed can be used with Prolog technology, and provides those features to the most used professional spreadsheet: Microsoft Excel. Throughout the paper we explore the plug-in features with several business examples.