Related papers: New Guidelines For Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are software programs which are typically created by end-users and often used for business-critical tasks. Many studies indicate that errors in spreadsheets are very common. Thus, a number of vendors offer auditing tools which…
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…
Coding standards and good practices are fundamental to a disciplined approach to software projects, whatever programming languages they employ. Prolog programming can benefit from such an approach, perhaps more than programming in other…
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…
The use of spreadsheets is widespread. Be it in business, finance, engineering or other areas, spreadsheets are created for their flexibility and ease to quickly model a problem. Very often they evolve from simple prototypes to…
Program text is rendered using impoverished typographic styles. Beyond choice of fonts and syntax-highlighting colors, code editors and related tools utilize very few text decorations. These limited styles are, furthermore, applied in…
Spreadsheets offer a supremely successful and intuitive means of processing and exchanging numerical content. Its intuitive ad-hoc nature makes it hugely popular for use in diverse areas including business and engineering, yet these very…
We propose a research strategy for creating and deploying prescriptive recommendations for spreadsheet practice. Empirical data on usage can be used to create a taxonomy of spreadsheet classes. Within each class, existing practices and…
We present a widely-used operations management model used in supply and distribution planning, that is typically embedded in a periodic business process that necessitates model modification and reuse. We consider three alternative…
This paper presents a toolkit for spreadsheet visualization based on logical areas, semantic classes and data modules. Logical areas, semantic classes and data modules are abstract representations of spreadsheet programs that are meant to…
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…
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…
Our term "structure discovery" denotes the recovery of structure, such as the grouping of cells, that was intended by a spreadsheet's author but is not explicit in the spreadsheet. We are implementing structure discovery tools in the…
Amongst the large number of write-and-throw-away spreadsheets developed for one-time use there is a rather neglected proportion of spreadsheets that are huge, periodically used, and submitted to regular update-cycles like any conventionally…
A central challenge in science is to understand how systems behaviors emerge from complex networks. This often requires aggregating, reusing, and integrating heterogeneous information. Supplementary spreadsheets to articles are a key data…
"Look before you leap"; "a stitch in time saves nine"; "more haste, less speed". Many proverbs declare the wisdom of planning before doing. We suggest how to apply this to Excel, by explaining and specifying spreadsheets before coding them,…
Spreadsheets are end-user programs and domain models that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. As a result,…
Mathematical knowledge is a central component in science, engineering, and technology (documentation). Most of it is represented informally, and -- in contrast to published research mathematics -- subject to continual change. Unfortunately,…
Mathematical software systems are becoming more and more important in pure and applied mathematics in order to deal with the complexity and scalability issues inherent in mathematics. In the last decades we have seen a cambric explosion of…
Spreadsheets are critical to data-centric tasks, with rich, structured layouts that enable efficient information transmission. Given the time and expertise required for manual spreadsheet layout design, there is an urgent need for automated…