{"id":685254,"date":"2020-08-16T05:58:15","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T12:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=685254"},"modified":"2021-07-01T20:48:06","modified_gmt":"2021-07-02T03:48:06","slug":"neural-formatting-for-spreadsheet-tables","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/neural-formatting-for-spreadsheet-tables\/","title":{"rendered":"Neural Formatting for Spreadsheet Tables"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spreadsheets are popular and widely used for data presentation and management, where users create tables in various structures to organize and present data. Table formatting is an important yet tedious task for better exhibiting table structures and data relationships. However, without the aid of intelligent tools, manual formatting remains a tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose CellGAN, a neural formatting model for learning and recommending formats of spreadsheet tables. Based on a novel conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) architecture, CellGAN learns table formatting from real-world spreadsheet tables in a self-supervised fashion without requiring human labeling. In CellGAN we devise two mechanisms, row\/column-wise pooling and local refinement network, to address challenges from the spreadsheet domain. We evaluate the effectiveness of CellGAN against real-world datasets using both quantitative metrics and human perception studies. The results indicate remarkable performance gains over rule-based methods, graphical models or direct application of the state-of-the-art cGANs used in visual synthesis tasks. Neural Formatting is the first step towards auto-formatting for spreadsheet tables with promising results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spreadsheets are popular and widely used for data presentation and management, where users create tables in various structures to organize and present data. Table formatting is an important yet tedious task for better exhibiting table structures and data relationships. However, without the aid of intelligent tools, manual formatting remains a tedious and time-consuming task. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556,13563],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-685254","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2020-10-20","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3340531.3411943","label_id":"243106","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3340531.3411943","label_id":"243118","label":0}],"msr_attachments":[{"id":757627,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Semantic-Table-Structure-Identification-in-Spreadsheets.pdf"},{"id":685257,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/main-5f392be8eb2db.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Haoyu Dong","user_id":37128,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Haoyu Dong"},{"type":"text","value":"Jinyu Wang","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Zhouyu Fu","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shi Han","user_id":33618,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Shi Han"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Dongmei Zhang","user_id":31665,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Dongmei Zhang"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199560],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144847,714577],"msr_project":[558663],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":558663,"post_title":"Spreadsheet Intelligence","post_name":"spreadsheet-intelligence","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2019-01-06 17:18:03","post_modified":"2022-04-24 01:24:49","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/spreadsheet-intelligence\/","post_excerpt":"At Microsoft Research Asia, this is the umbrella research project behind Ideas in Excel of Microsoft Office 365 product.\u00a0With successful technology transfers via close collaboration with Excel teams,\u00a0this intelligent\u00a0feature has been announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference and released with General Availability on March 1, 2019. There are following sub- or related research projects on some fundamental technology pillars, respectively. They jointly enable such one-click intelligence of Ideas in Excel. 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