Past work in the visualization community has produced interactive tables for specific applications, and include systems such as TableLens [20], FOCUS [27], a graphical financial spreadsheet called FINESSE [31]. The TableLens system [20], designed for browsing tabular numerical information, looks much like a conventional spreadsheet with bar graphs. The FOCUS interactive table, modeled after TableLens, allows sophisticated navigation via sorting and hiding of information contained in the table, but lacks editing capabilities [27]. FOCUS is similar to TableLens, with the main difference between the two in the interaction methods. TableLens uses a fish-eye layout strategy for display, whereas FOCUS uses a dynamic querying mechanism as the primary interaction method. FINESSE is a prototype system designed for financial data, where the cells are on fixed grids and contain four representation primitives--line plots, 3D surface plots, heat maps, or 3D bar graphs.
The NoPumpG prototype [35] system abandons the fixed tabular grid of conventional spreadsheets, so all cells are free floating. It allows the specification of line plots based on sliders attached to variable values [35]. It is compared to a spreadsheet because of its data dependency capabilities.
Spreadsheet for visualization is a natural extension of the above ideas. Our work focuses on the area of information visualization, and the issues that arise prominently in that domain. We build upon the experiences of other spreadsheets mentioned above, and include a variety of different visual representations and operations useful for interacting with the data. The image spreadsheets (IISS and Levoy's SI) focused on images, and the associated image operations. We take a similar approach to Levoy's SI system in using Tcl as the command language, but we focus on the tasks and operation associated with information visualization. Our work is most like FINESSE [31], but differs from FINESSE because our prototypes allows animation, dynamic visual filtering [5, 1], and dynamic mapping of variables to representation. FINESSE has a limited number of cell primitives, whereas our prototype allows a wide variety of geometric primitives, since our prototype is built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) [25, 26]. Using a command language, our prototype also allows users to construct their own visual representations of their data. FINESSE focuses on financial data, whereas our system can be tailored to any information visualization tasks. Lastly, in contrast to the visualization spreadsheet, existing large visualization systems are designed for viewing a single visualization at a time. In a data-flow network, a large amount of screen space is devoted to the operators, rather than the operands. We believe that for many applications spreadsheets can provide better interaction.
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