Why FlowSheet?

Everyone hates doing algebra, because mental symbol-manipulation is not what our brains were born to do.

But we have the world's best visual ability, of shape and contour and color and texture, so a way to convert symbol-laden algebra into shapes and colors might help people get past that awful confusion of cryptic notation. At the very least, a visual version of a formula is a different, complementary way of understanding it, the better to catch patterns or mistakes.

People only figured out how to graph regular numbers a couple hundred years ago, with the first line graphs; scatterplots, error bars, and three-dimensional plots came later. But we still haven't decided how to graph computation.

Graphing ordinary data means taking a set of numbers and constructing a two- or three-dimensional image representing those numbers: pie charts, bar graphs, scatterplots, cool shapes which gleam and hover. Graphing computation, on the other hand, means constructing an image which represents how one set of numbers is transformed into another set of numbers. Of course we already have some ways to graph certain computations, like the function Y(x) which shows how an output Y changes as its input x changes. But that approach doesn't work as well when Y depends on lots of input variables, or when Y is constructed of lots of different sub-functions, each of which needs graphing as well... that Y(x) approach graphs one specific function, but not algebra in general.

So a way to graph algebra can be useful, because many people wrestle with it all day long as they build and tinker with formulas like

SUM(A3:A7) * SUM(B3:B7) - C2

What does that formula look like?

FlowSheet is a visual language for viewing equations like those in spreadsheets. It shows numeric values as lines moving across a flowchart (hence Flowchart + spreadsheet = FlowSheet). The source of each line is its value in a cell of the spreadsheet, and its destination is a computation in another cell of the spreadsheet. If the speadsheet's cells are arranged reasonably (e.g. computations going roughly left-to-right and top-to-bottom), the FlowSheet is visually easy to follow.