Can an LLM Find Its Way Around a Spreadsheet?

Spreadsheets are routinely used in business and scientific contexts, and one of the most vexing challenges is performing data cleaning prior to analysis and evaluation. The ad-hoc and arbitrary nature of data cleaning problems, such as typos, inconsistent formatting, missing values, and a lack of standardization, often creates the need for highly specialized pipelines. We ask whether an LLM can find its way around a spreadsheet and how to support end-users in taking their free-form data processing requests to fruition. Just like RAG retrieves context to answer users' queries, we demonstrate how we can retrieve elements from a code library to compose data preprocessing pipelines. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the quality of our system and how it is able to continuously augment its vocabulary by saving new codes and pipelines back to the code library for future retrieval.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-04-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/icse55347.2025.00101
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Spreadsheets and End-User Computing
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
2.31

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Can an LLM Find Its Way Around a Spreadsheet?

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Spreadsheets and End-User Computing
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Can an LLM Find Its Way Around a Spreadsheet?

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article en
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Abstract

Spreadsheets are routinely used in business and scientific contexts, and one of the most vexing challenges is performing data cleaning prior to analysis and evaluation. The ad-hoc and arbitrary nature of data cleaning problems, such as typos, inconsistent formatting, missing values, and a lack of standardization, often creates the need for highly specialized pipelines. We ask whether an LLM can find its way around a spreadsheet and how to support end-users in taking their free-form data processing requests to fruition. Just like RAG retrieves context to answer users' queries, we demonstrate how we can retrieve elements from a code library to compose data preprocessing pipelines. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the quality of our system and how it is able to continuously augment its vocabulary by saving new codes and pipelines back to the code library for future retrieval.

Virginia Tech (US)
National Science Foundation
Openalex Percentile: Top 12%
Spreadsheets and End-User Computing
2.31
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