Related papers: Spreadsheet Hell
A spreadsheet usually starts as a simple and single-user software artifact, but, as frequent as in other software systems, quickly evolves into a complex system developed by many actors. Often, different users work on different aspects of…
Her Majestys Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was born out of the need to create a UK tax authority by merging both the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise into one department. HMRC encounters spreadsheets in tax-payers systems on a very regular…
While scientists increasingly recognize the importance of metadata in describing their data, spreadsheets remain the preferred tool for supplying this information despite their limitations in ensuring compliance and quality. Various tools…
Current prescriptions for spreadsheet style specify modular separation of data, calcu1ation and output, based on the notion that writing a spreadsheet is like writing a computer program. Instead of a computer programming style, this article…
Fifteen years of research studies have concluded unanimously that spreadsheet errors are both common and non-trivial. Now we must seek ways to reduce spreadsheet errors. Several approaches have been suggested, some of which are promising…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of the software engineering of a class of business spreadsheet models. A methodology for structured software development is proposed, which is based on structured analysis of data, represented as…
A demonstration in MS Excel to show how users can connect their spreadsheet models to the external environment that the model represents. We employ indexes to generate a list of relevant evidence that is hyperlinked to the context in which…
While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a…
This paper maintains that archiving has been overlooked as a key spreadsheet internal control. The case of failed Jamaican commercial banks demonstrates how poor archiving can lead to weaknesses in spreadsheet control that contribute to…
Spreadsheets are commonly used in organizations as a programming tool for business-related calculations and decision making. Since faults in spreadsheets can have severe business impacts, a number of approaches from general software…
Recent research has highlighted the high incidence of errors in spreadsheet models used in industry. In an attempt to reduce the incidence of such errors, a teaching approach has been devised which aids students to reduce their likelihood…
In the insurance industry, spreadsheets have emerged as an invaluable tool to for product pricing, because it is relatively straightforward to create and maintain complex pricing models using Excel. In fact, Excel is often preferred to…
Research on spreadsheet errors is substantial, compelling, and unanimous. It has three simple conclusions. The first is that spreadsheet errors are rare on a per-cell basis, but in large programs, at least one incorrect bottom-line value is…
Most spreadsheet surveys both for reporting use and error focus on the practical application of the spreadsheet in a particular industry. Typically these studies will illustrate that a particular percentage of spreadsheets are used for…
Spreadsheets have grown up and became very powerful and easy to use tools in applying analytical techniques for solving business problems. Operations managers, production managers, planners and schedulers can work with them in developing…
Spreadsheets offer a supremely successful democratisation platform, placing the manipulation and presentation of numbers within the grasp of users that have little or no mathematical expertise or IT experience. What appears to be almost…
For many legal operations teams, the management of the contracts and agreements that their organization are negotiating or have been executed is an encompassing and time-consuming task. This has resulted in specialized tools for Contract…
Previous spreadsheet inspection experiments have had human subjects look for seeded errors in spreadsheets. In this study, subjects attempted to find errors in human-developed spreadsheets to avoid the potential artifacts created by error…
A computing environment is proposed, based on batch spreadsheet processing, which produces a spreadsheet display from plain text input files of commands, similar to the way documents are created using LaTeX. In this environment, besides the…
We present Risk Integrated's Enterprise Spreadsheet Platform (ESP), a technical approach to the near-elimination of spreadsheet risk in the enterprise computing environment, whilst maintaining the full flexibility of spreadsheets for…