Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel

Summary: Extensible Excel data transformation via TDE synthesizes programs from 3 I/O examples using external logic (source code, DLLs, web services, mappings). End-users reuse libraries and services in spreadsheet workflows, enabling ad-hoc cleaning without custom scripts. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5562
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 5.7095504e-05
Overall Rank: 7,078 | 51.44%
DOI: 10.1145/3183713.3193539

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Yeye He (Microsoft)
2. Kris Ganjam (Microsoft)
3. Kukjin Lee (Microsoft)
4. Yue Wang (Microsoft)
5. Vivek Narasayya (Microsoft)
6. Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft)
7. Xu Chu (Georgia Institute of Technology)
8. Yudian Zheng (Twitter)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{he_sigmod18,
        title = {{Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel}},
        author = {He, Yeye and Ganjam, Kris and Lee, Kukjin and Wang, Yue and Narasayya, Vivek and Chaudhuri, Surajit and Chu, Xu and Zheng, Yudian},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '18},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3183713.3193539},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183713.3193539},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,412	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.7168614e-05
4,875	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.4689177e-05
6,436	Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types using Open-source Code	2018	SIGMOD	5.8793793e-05
6,545	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD	5.8454882e-05
8,797	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	5.3702298e-05
9,380	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.2755515e-05
9,505	TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations	2025	VLDB	5.258497e-05
9,930	Data Augmentation for ML-driven Data Preparation and Integration	2021	VLDB	5.1955087e-05
10,202	BAT: Target-Instance-Free Data Preparation Synthesis via LLM-Driven Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,160	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00011883163
1,165	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011860616
1,866	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR	9.5914583e-05
8,491	Synthesizing Mapping Relationships Using Table Corpus	2017	SIGMOD	5.414689e-05

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3	7,869	Foofah: A Programming-By-Example System for Synthesizing Data Transformation Programs	2017	SIGMOD
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