Spreadsheet-Driven Web Applications

Creating and publishing read-write-compute web applica-tions requires programming skills beyond what most end users possess. But many end users know how to make spread-sheets that act as simple information management applica-tions, often with computation. We present a system for creat-ing basic web applications using such spreadsheets in place of a server and using HTML to describe the client UI. Authors connect the two by placing spreadsheet references inside HTML attributes. Data computation is provided by spread-sheet formulas. The result is a reactive read-write-compute web page without a single line of Javascript code. Nearly all of the fifteen HTML novices we studied were able to con-nect HTML to spreadsheets using our method with minimal instruction. We draw conclusions from their experience and discuss future extensions to this programming model. Author Keywords Web design; Spreadsheets; End-user programming; Information architectur