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This paper introduces Kale, a novel spreadsheet system designed to mitigate the risks associated with erroneous reference updates when users modify table structures. Through a user study, it was found that traditional spreadsheet reference semantics often lead to significant user errors, highlighting the need for a safer alternative. Kale restricts the types of references that can be created, allowing users to complete tasks with reduced error rates compared to conventional systems.
Standard spreadsheet references can lead to user errors, but Kale's restrictions dramatically reduce these risks, making spreadsheet tasks safer and more reliable.
Spreadsheet formulas can refer to rectangular ranges of arbitrary size. When a user changes the structure of a referenced table, the spreadsheet system updates the references to refer to a new range. Unfortunately, this new range may differ from the user's expectations, introducing bugs in spreadsheets. We describe a user study showing that standard reference semantics are error-prone, resulting in significant risk to users. We introduce Kale, a prototype system that eliminates the risk of inserting these kinds of bugs by restricting the kinds of references that can be expressed. We show that Kale can be used effectively by users to complete tasks that are error-prone in traditional spreadsheet systems. Finally, we describe a corpus study that evaluates the extent to which the reference restrictions in Kale might have implications on users.
