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Spreadsheets and Cells
Spreadsheets in STEPS are just another “graphical object with dynamic properties”—a sibling to text
paragraphs (which they contain among other things). We like spreadsheets, but think of individual cells
as the important idea, and so our spreadsheets are actually documents of cells that can be organized in a
variety of ways.
For example, a cell can be embedded in any text. They can be embedded in “tables” (to make what
appears to be an ordinary spreadsheet). They can be organized as lists, etc. Below are examples from a
one page “active essay” explaining the concept of Standard Deviation. Active cells are used freely. The
yellow one shows the average – and drives the height of the horizontal bar. The gray cells are embedded
in the text and show values from the sliders in the graph and results of calculations.
Our cells are also more general than those of a standard spreadsheet. They can be thought of as
“dynamic retriever‑calculators” at the bottom, and as “generalized viewers” at their top visible
manifestation. Many interesting and useful applications can be built quickly and easily with
spreadsheet cells (we show an example later in this report).
VPRI Technical Report TR-2011-004
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