Mathematicians and statisticians have long used tables of sine, cosine, and confidence probabilities. More recently, the invention of the VisiCalc numerical spreadsheet in 1979 fueled the adoption of personal computers [3].
Statisticians have examined visualizing higher dimensional point sets by a table of projections. For example, one multivariate analysis tool is the scatter matrix, which is a table of scatter plots (see [6]). Visualization researchers have applied similar ideas, but in different ways, to produce a table of views of a single dataset [30, 2]. In the scatter matrix, a statistics researcher may mark a datum in one scatter plot, and the program would then highlight the corresponding point in all other scatter plots. These approaches represent a largely static tabular approach to the data, but some interactivity is present, such as rotations, translation, and zooming.
There are several distortion presentation techniques based on a tabular layout [14] such as Document Lens [21], fish-eye views [8, 23], stretching rubber sheets [24].