USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, 3251 Old Lee Highway, Room 301, Fairfax, VA 22030

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Abstract—A typical tabular business report contains a set of cells. The cells may contain raw numeric values, character labels, and formulas. This paper will present a bottom-up algorithm for visually documenting the cells in a set of tabular reports. The algorithm draws a tree-like structure in a view port. The nodes in the tree can represent the either a raw numeric value or a formula. The arcs in the tree show which nodes share common variables in their respective formulas. In a requirements driven environment, this visual documentation allows the programmer and the system analyst to trace the final programmed reports (i.e. the final product) back to the requirements documentation.
Index Terms—Business planning, documentation, visual languages, trees (graphs), hidden lines

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Cite: Roger L. Goodwin, " An Algorithm for Documenting Relationships in a Set of Reports," Journal of Software vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 41-48, 2008.