Spreadsheet is a very popular interview question with many variations. This article discusses some requirements we may encounter during interviews.

Discussion

A few common questions about the spreadsheet at first

  1. Boundary or unlimited
  2. Cell content formats
  3. Cell position formats
  4. Advanced operations

Intuitively, a two dimensional array can be the storage but with infinite boundary, we have to use a map/dict. The map could be position to value in general or row to list or dict for row based operation.

# position -> value
{
	pos1: value1,
	pos2: value2
}

# row -> list
{
	row1: [val11, val12, val13]
	row2: [val21, val22, val23]
}

# row -> map ( col -> value)
{
	row1: { 
		col11: val11,
		col12: val12,
		},
	row2: {
		col21: val21,
		col22: val22,
	}
}

For cell format, the basic one is a pure string or integer. Some advanced cell formats are equation including addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

The cell position is most-likely defined as a digit row index and alphbat column index, e.g, ‘1A’

Basic Requirement

Advanced Requirement