  We report on the development of a general tool called ExSched, implemented as
a plug-in for Microsoft Excel, for solving a class of constraint satisfaction
problems. The traditional spreadsheet paradigm is based on attaching arithmetic
expressions to individual cells and then evaluating them. The ExSched interface
generalizes the spreadsheet paradigm to allow finite domain constraints to be
attached to the individual cells that are then solved to get a solution. This
extension provides a user-friendly interface for solving constraint
satisfaction problems that can be modeled as 2D tables, such as scheduling
problems, timetabling problems, product configuration, etc. ExSched can be
regarded as a spreadsheet interface to CLP(FD) that hides the syntactic and
semantic complexity of CLP(FD) and enables novice users to solve many
scheduling and timetabling problems interactively.
