A method and system are provided for inferring a schema from an electronic document containing hierarchical data for use in a spreadsheet application program. The electronic document containing the hierarchical data is received into an application program. The application program may be a spreadsheet application program. The format of the hierarchical data structure may be XML. The hierarchical data includes a set of nodes making up the structure of the hierarchical data. The nodes may be XML elements and attributes. The hierarchical data is then parsed to discover one of the nodes in the hierarchical data. Once the node has been discovered, content associated with the discovered node is saved to a memory location in the computer system. The content may include data associated with the discovered node and the type of data associated with the node. The hierarchical data is then parsed again to discover subsequent nodes until the content for all of the nodes has been saved to the memory location. Then a schema generator generates schema elements using complex rules based on the particular qualities of each discovered node for each discovered node until a schema is generated for the hierarchical data.