The present teachings generally include techniques and systems for managing memory utilization in processing spreadsheet functionality, including handling data of certain cells virtually by referencing related data and efficiently handling duplicate data. The present teachings may include methods for determining mapping functions that reference target cells to input cells, call the mapping functions when data from a target cell is requested, and access input data according to the mapping functions to determine the data of the requested target cells. In addition, or instead, the techniques may involve identifying duplicate data between collections of cells, storing the duplicate data independently, and referencing the original cell collections to the independently stored duplicate data. These techniques can be useful for, inter alia, reducing memory usage, improving computational performance, and enabling more efficient manipulation of large spreadsheets with redundant data across multiple worksheets or sections.