Data structure used for implementing spreadsheets

Question

What is the data structure used by spreadsheets program like ms-excel?

Are you interested in the means of storing the contents of the cells, or of storing and keeping track of the many cells, or both? — dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten, Feb 08 '09 at 18:31

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 08 '09 at 17:50

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Maybe, probably, a sparse matrix:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_matrix

answered Feb 08 '09 at 17:50

Corey Trager

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 13 '11 at 23:27

I got this question in an interview today.

The answer they were looking for (because I asked the interviewer at the end) was to implement a class structure that used multiple objects; formulas, references, and numerics.

Not much more detail to offer but suffice it to say that programs like google docs are much more interesting (to code) than they seem.

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 08 '09 at 18:17

While it is not exactly Excel, Open Office's Spreadsheet program is open source. It's a fairly large code base but nevertheless giving it a peek might give you a better understanding of how such an application is implemented:

http://contributing.openoffice.org/programming.html

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

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I expect it to use many.

For example, an AST to recalculate formulas (see this question).

edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

Community

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answered Feb 08 '09 at 18:49

friol

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 08 '09 at 17:51

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Possibly a multi-dimensional array.

answered Feb 08 '09 at 17:51

Bravax

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That may have been the case for early spreadsheets with naive implementations that limited rows and columns to a quantity that could fit in memory, but it's doubtful any successful implementation would suffer such constraints as a 2D array would impose. The art is to give the feel of a 2D array without actually being a 2D array. – DavidO Aug 02 '15 at 15:36
Since someone asked me directly via email what I meant by this comment, a spreadsheet's underlying datastructure is typically a directed acyclic graph, to create a sparse array. What is seen on screen is really just the view of a traversal of the data model in a row/column order, where the row/column information is just contained within each vertex along with the payload. – DavidO Dec 25 '21 at 09:07

Data structure used for implementing spreadsheets

5 Answers5

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