Managing Multi-Valued Attributes in Spreadsheet Applications

End-users frequently prefer to use spreadsheets as a medium for storing simple data. There are a number of commonly used data arrangements to cope with data items that are connected with a many-many relationship. These arrangements offer the end-user simplicity in data entry and simple reporting. However as the application evolves it soon becomes apparent that these arrangements of data have serious drawbacks when it comes to querying and summarising the data. At this point it becomes necessary to move the data to a database. This is a non-trivial task with currently available tools. In this paper we review the data arrangements typically used to store many-many data relationships in a spreadsheet. We report on the development of an application to assist end-users to transform their spreadsheet data to normalised database tables. The application exploits the XML representation of spreadsheet data and employs the XML classes in Visual Studio.Net.