Methods and systems for connecting a spreadsheet to external data sources with formulaic specification of data retrieval

摘要

The technology disclosed relates to accessing external data in spreadsheet cells and includes spreadsheet cells that can use formulaically defined external data, allowing users to utilize many cells as if they were one cell and to simplify or expand the type of calculations possible within a cell. The disclosed technology further includes a spreadsheet application that can perform looped calculations within the spreadsheet cells without the need to use an embedded programming language. Additionally the disclosed spreadsheet application can use named variables and formulaic cell designators for cell operations in which formulaically defined non-spreadsheet cell data variables and their values can be exposed and multiple values can exist in a cell, and the user can step through and see those different values.