ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,664,177, issued on June 23, was assigned to SIGMA COMPUTING INC. (San Francisco).

"Dependency tree-based copying and pasting" was invented by Vladislav Boboshko (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Dillon Morrison (San Francisco).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Dependency tree-based copying and pasting including receiving, by a workbook manager from a client computing system, a request to paste a first workbook element from a first workbook to a second workbook, determining, by the workbook manager, that the first workbook element of the first workbook is in a first dependency relationship with one or more other workbook elements in the first workbook,...