Slate will show the cells that are in another document but referenced by the current sheet. However, it would not show any further levels of referenced cells.
So say I reference the value "Total Sales" which is in another sheet. That would show in the the tree but the individual sales that contribute to the total would not be shown.
We wanted people to know where the numbers are coming from but at the same time keep the trees for different sheets and files separate to prevent them becoming too unwieldy and hard to understand.
Almost all Excel users are not programmers, you're definitely right. If by clerical workers you mean people who are just entering data into the sheet or reading an output then, yes, they don't need to understand what the sheet is doing.
However there are loads of people who build there own sheets: analysts, consultants, managers, marketing, accountants and yes engineers. These are the people who spend the most time using excel. Excel let's you build a very complex model formula by formula. It's often a model more complex than you might be able to map out initially. Whilst they are not programmers they are still smart enough to understand the sheets they've built. The issue is Excel right now is so opaque about what its doing and where the numbers come from. It makes this task much harder than it needs to be.
All these suggestions would make for a really powerful tool. The issue is how to make it all approachable to non-coders. Almost all the excel users I've talked to don't know how to make macros let alone any more complex code. I think the issue is trying to make these concepts understandable and usable to everyone so users can get started straight away.
Right now companies don't send their employees on VBA courses even though they could work some much more efficiently with a basic knowledge of coding.
Interesting stuff. Yeah whats great about excel is there is zero learning needed to get started. Anyone can start typing numbers in the cells then move on to more complex tasks. The problem is, although each step towards building a model in Excel is quite simple the end results can be very unwieldy.
-A formula such as INDEX or MATCH is shown as a box with an arrow coming in for each parameter of the function. Hovering over the box gives a breakdown of which cell is being looked up for each row.
-None of the content of the spreadsheet is uploaded.
-We're not looking at building the model as a tree right now but it's a cool area to explore.
I'm not sure I agree with the second point. Excel has tons of debugging features, too many. It means most people don't know about all the tools and they're all really badly designed. This is about getting rid of all that and creating one new feature, the tree view. Which offers way more functionality on it's own.