Methods for structuring electronic documents having an ordered set of cells (e.g., spreadsheets or web documents) are provided. In general, the methods provide for multidimensionality by allowing cells to be split by splitting operators, thus allowing cells to contain additional groups of cells, and recursively so. Disclosed are tools and operations for building and modifying various multi-dimensional structures and for interacting with them. Splitting operators provide a two-dimensional equivalent of lexical scopes and iterators in programming languages and allow a direct mapping to external data structures. With these features, the disclosed methods are able to combine the flexibility and unstructured nature of traditional spreadsheet with the structuring capabilities of online analytic processing (OLAP)-based tools.