Fragmenting spreadsheets

Abstract

The present teachings include techniques and systems for processing spreadsheets at the level of a worksheet or another collection of cells, including the fragmenting of spreadsheets. For example, a spreadsheet may include one or more input worksheets, output worksheets, and/or transient worksheets, where transient worksheets utilize input data in input worksheets to facilitate creation of output data in output worksheets. In particular, fragmenting a spreadsheet may include determining, for each output worksheet, what input and transient worksheets are needed to create output data in the output worksheet, and then creating a plurality of fragments therefrom. Thus, fragmenting a spreadsheet may include a temporal and/or physical decoupling of the spreadsheet's worksheets. This can be useful for, inter alia, understanding the relationships between a plurality of worksheets, isolating certain processing tasks, editing or interchanging worksheets, and/or for improving computational performance, e.g., by routing particular fragments to appropriate computational resources for processing thereof.