What is it about?
TweakIt lets people use Python code in spreadsheets. Data analysts often find Python examples online but lack an easy way to make the examples useful for their personal work. With TweakIt, users can paste code into a scratchpad built into a Microsoft Excel sidebar. When users edit the code, TweakIt automatically puts the transformed data into the spreadsheet.
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Why is it important?
When data analysts use Google for help, they often find Python code that they don't know how to use for their spreadsheet data. TweakIt expands the types of work analysts can do. For example, a microbiologist with TweakIt can use the biopython package to work with protein sequences in Excel.
Perspectives
To us, the TweakIt paper is not as much about the technology as it is about the analysts we studied. This study showed us that data analysts face truly difficult data manipulation tasks in their work, and that they see a potential solution in code, if only they could figure out how to make it run! Our hope is that this paper inspires other systems that provide "just enough" help for data analysts who want to get their jobs done without needing years of programming background.
Sam Lau
University of California San Diego
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: TweakIt: Supporting End-User Programmers Who Transmogrify Code, May 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445265.
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