FlowSheets - Breaking out of the Limitations of Traditional Spreadsheets

ANKHOR FlowSheet starts with all that is good about spreadsheets and takes them to the next level, overcoming the known problems and limitations and enabling a visual way for manipulating data.

Like with spreadsheets, you work with tables into which data is either manually entered or imported from an outside data source, e.g. read from a file or retrieved by a SQL query. However, a FlowSheet can contain more than one table per sheet, while in spreadsheet applications, the table is the sheet.

In spreadsheets you then apply calculations by assigning formulas built with operators to cells that receive the result of applying these formulas to other cells (or rows and columns of cells) of the sheet. The following is an example for a spreadsheet calculating the sum of the columns A, B and C:

With a FlowSheet, you create formulas by placing operators in it, and connecting the data tables with inputs of these operators. The result of applying such an operator is again a table, which is available at the operator’s output and has exactly the size required for holding the result. Here the same example as a FlowSheet:

A structure like this represents a classic data flow graph using tables as the main data type. This is why we came up with the name “FlowSheet” to describe this combination of dataflow graph and spreadsheet.

The significant differences between this FlowSheet and the above example spreadsheet are: