ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,307,193, issued on May 20, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).
"Spreadsheet table transformation" was invented by Haoyu Dong (Beijing), Shi Han (Beijing), Dongmei Zhang (Beijing), Jennifer Michelstein Halberstam (Issaquah, Wash.) and Xiao Lyu (Beijing).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Implementations of the present disclosure provide a solution for spreadsheet table transformation. In this solution, one or more header areas and a data area of a spreadsheet table are detected. A hierarchical structure of each of the header areas is determined by analysis of cell merging and/or indents in the header area, and/...