Implementing WHERE and ORDER BY as spreadsheet formulas
This provides a solution for spreadsheet users needing automated data manipulation, though it is incremental as it adapts existing SQL concepts to spreadsheets.
The paper tackled the problem of spreadsheet tools not automatically reacting to changes in calculated values by developing spreadsheet formulas that implement SQL's WHERE and ORDER BY clauses, enabling dynamic filtering and sorting.
The WHERE and ORDER BY clauses of the SQL SELECT statement select a subset of rows in the result of a database query and present the result in the specified order. In a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, one could use the filter and sort buttons, or use its Query or its Pivot Table tools to achieve a similar effect. The disadvantage of using those tools is that they don't react automatically to changes in the calculated values of the spreadsheet. In this paper, we develop spreadsheet formulas that implement SQL's WHERE and ORDER BY clauses.