Patent ID: 7707486

Claim:
A method for displaying consequences in an electronic spreadsheet, the method comprising: specifying a set of cells of the spreadsheet and a set of logical constraints on possible values of the cells; dynamically partitioning the set of cells into base cells and computed cells; assigning to the base cells a set of user-specified values, wherein the user-specified values are possibly inconsistent with the specified logical constraints; computing non-explosive logical consequences of the user-specified values and the set of logical constraints using a paraconsistent consequence relation to produce a complete set of entailed values for the set of computed cells; reducing the number of entailed values for each computed cell whose number of entailed values exceeds a predetermined number of allowed values for the computed cell; and displaying a subset of the entailed values and a subset of the user-specified values; wherein computing the non-explosive logical consequences comprises computing logical consequences of multiple consistent subsets of the user-specified values to produce multiple subsets of the complete set of entailed values, and combining the multiple subsets of the complete set of entailed values.