SheetDesigner: MLLM-Powered Spreadsheet Layout Generation with Rule-Based and Vision-Based Reflection

Spreadsheets are critical to data-centric tasks, with rich, structured layouts that enable efficient information transmission. Given the time and expertise required for manual spreadsheet layout design, there is an urgent need for automated solutions. However, existing automated layout models are ill-suited to spreadsheets, as they often (1) treat components as axis-aligned rectangles with continuous coordinates, overlooking the inherently discrete, grid-based structure of spreadsheets; and (2) neglect interrelated semantics, such as data dependencies and contextual links, unique to spreadsheets. In this paper, we first formalize the spreadsheet layout generation task, supported by a seven-criterion evaluation protocol and a dataset of 3,326 spreadsheets. We then introduce SheetDesigner, a zero-shot and training-free framework using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that combines rule and vision reflection for component placement and content population. SheetDesigner outperforms five baselines by at least 22.6\%. We further find that through vision modality, MLLMs handle overlap and balance well but struggle with alignment, necessitates hybrid rule and visual reflection strategies. Our codes and data is available at Github.