Related papers: Categorisation of Spreadsheet Use within Organisat…

We briefly review the well-known risks, weaknesses and limitations of spreadsheets and then introduce some more. We review and slightly extend our previous work on the importance and criticality of spreadsheets in the City of London,…

Much of what EuSpRIG discusses is concerned with the integrity of individual spreadsheets. In businesses, interlocking spreadsheets are regularly used to fill functional gaps in core administrative systems. The growth and deployment of such…

Spreadsheets (sometimes also called Excel programs) are powerful tools which play a business-critical role in many organizations. However, due to faulty spreadsheets many bad decisions have been taken in recent years. Since then, a number…

Spreadsheets are widely used within companies and often form the basis for business decisions. Numerous cases are known where incorrect information in spreadsheets has lead to incorrect decisions. Such cases underline the relevance of…

Research on spreadsheet errors began over fifteen years ago. During that time, there has been ample evidence demonstrating that spreadsheet errors are common and nontrivial. Quite simply, spreadsheet error rates are comparable to error…

This paper offers a brief review of cognitive verbs typically used in the literature to describe standard spreadsheet practices. The verbs identified are then categorised in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy of Hierarchical Levels, and then rated…

Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by…

The hard coding of input data or constants into spreadsheet formulas is widely recognised as poor spreadsheet model design. However, the importance of avoiding such practice appears to be underestimated perhaps in light of the lack of…

This paper presents the authors recommended practices for spreadsheet testing. Documented spreadsheet error rates are unacceptable in corporations today. Although improvements are needed throughout the systems development life cycle,…

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…

One of the problems reported by researchers and auditors in the field of spreadsheet risks is that of getting and keeping managements attention to the problem. Since 1996, the Information Systems Audit & Control Foundation and the IT…

Few major commercial or economic decisions are made today which are not underpinned by analysis using spreadsheets. It is virtually impossible to avoid making mistakes during their drafting and some of these errors remain, unseen and…

The humble spreadsheet is the most widely used data storage, manipulation and modelling tool. Its ubiquity over the past 30 years has seen its successful application in every area of life. Surprisingly the spreadsheet has remained…

This paper outlines an approach to manage and quantify the risks associated with changes made to spreadsheets. The methodology focuses on structural differences between spreadsheets and suggests a technique by which a risk analysis can be…

Past studies show that only a small percent of organizations implement and enforce formal rules or informal guidelines for the designing, testing, documenting, using, modifying, sharing and archiving of spreadsheet models. Due to lack of…

Previous research on spreadsheet risks has predominantly focussed on errors inadvertently introduced by spreadsheet writers i.e. it focussed on the end-user aspects of spreadsheet development. When analyzing a faulty spreadsheet, one might…

Spreadsheet collaboration provides valuable opportunities for learning and expertise sharing between colleagues. Sharing expertise is essential for the retention of important technical skillsets within organisations, but previous studies…

Spreadsheet engineering methodologies are diverse and sometimes contradictory. It is difficult for spreadsheet developers to identify a spreadsheet engineering methodology that is appropriate for their class of spreadsheet, with its unique…

This paper discusses spreadsheets documentation and new means to achieve this end by using Excel's built-in "Comment" function. By structuring comments, they can be used as an essential tool to fully explain spreadsheet. This will greatly…

This paper demonstrates a methodology to help practitioners maximise the utility of complex multidisciplinary engineering models implemented as spreadsheets, an area presenting unique challenges. As motivation we investigate the expanding…