Benchmarking Spreadsheet Systems (original) (raw)

Spreadsheet systems are used for storing and analyzing data across virtually every domain by programmers and nonprogrammers alike. While spreadsheet systems have continued to support storage and analysis of increasingly large scale datasets, they are prone to hanging and freezing while performing computations even on much smaller datasets. We present a benchmarking study that evaluates and compares the performance of three popular spreadsheet systems, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, and Google Sheets, on a range of canonical spreadsheet computation operations. We find that spreadsheet systems lack interactivity for several operations, on datasets well below their documented scalability limits. We further evaluate whether spreadsheet systems adopt optimization techniques from the database community such as indexing, intelligent data layout, and incremental and shared computation, to efficiently execute computation operations. We outline several ways future spreadsheet systems can be redesigned to offer interactive response times on large datasets.