Games Programs Play: Obstacles to Data Reuse

Information workers often reuse data by taking it from an existing representation, recombining it to create new data, and storing the new data in another representation. The sources and destinations include databases, spreadsheets, web sites, text documents, and emails. Recombination activities are similarly diverse and include copy/pasting, concatenating, visual reformatting, arithmetic/calculating, and so forth. Yet many obstacles impede such reuse. In this paper, we summarize the problems that users face as well as some strategies for overcoming these problems.