SpreadComp platform: a new paradigm for distributed spreadsheet collaboration and composition

A huge amount of data is everyday produced, even in many critical business sectors, in a distributed, collaborative way with the support of spreadsheet applications. The manual fusion of such data often yields errors: copy-paste operations, loss of alignment and coherency due to multiple spreadsheet copies or broken cross-spreadsheet links. These problems are partially addressed by two of the principal software platforms for collaboration: Microsoft SharePoint and Google Docs. After describing features and tools of the two platforms specifically designed for spreadsheet collaboration, pointing out differences and limitations, we propose SpreadComp, a spreadsheet composition platform based on three new collaboration patterns which span users and data interaction from the simplest flat scenario to more structured and hierarchical ones. We discuss the positioning of our collaboration patterns with respect to the analyzed existing approaches and we present the SpreadComp architecture and its prototype implementation.