Methods for displaying and interfacing with polymorphic data in spreadsheets

Abstract

A spreadsheet user interface shows polymorphic records. The records include global fields, discriminator fields, and context-sensitive fields. A context-sensitive field is available or unavailable dependent on a discriminator field value. Record fields associate with spreadsheet columns, regardless of field availability. User confusion is prevented by marking a record's unavailable context-sensitive fields as unavailable and visually distinguishing them from available fields. A user-requested operation spanning multiple rows and columns is supported by testing whether a source cell and source data is available, a destination cell is available, and skipping the operation for those records whose source and/or destination cell is required but unavailable. An embodiment supports interfacing with a single record in a spreadsheet form by applying global form templates associated with global fields, and context-dependent form templates associated with specific discriminator field values.