Related papers: Spreadsheet good practice: is there any such thing…
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…
Among the multiple causes of high error rates in spreadsheets, lack of proper training and of deep understanding of the computational model upon which spreadsheet computations rest might not be the least issue. The paper addresses this…
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…
The machine learning community currently has no standardized process for documenting datasets, which can lead to severe consequences in high-stakes domains. To address this gap, we propose datasheets for datasets. In the electronics…
The wealth of functionality in the Excel software package means it can go beyond use as a static evaluator of predefined cell formulae, to be used actively in manipulating and transforming data. Due to human error it is impossible to ensure…
Microsoft Excel is the most ubiquitous analytical tool ever built. Companies around the world leverage it for its power, flexibility and ease of use. However, spreadsheets are manually intensive and prone to error, making it difficult for…
We investigate the expressive power of spreadsheets. We consider spreadsheets which contain only formulas, and assume that they are small templates, which can be filled to a larger area of the grid to process input data of variable size.…
Spreadsheets have been with us in their present form for over a quarter of a century. We have become so used to them that we forget that we are using them at all. It may serve us well to stand back for a moment to review where, when and how…
The ultimate goal of all optimization methods is to solve real-world problems. For a successful project execution, knowledge about optimization and the application has to be pooled. As it is too inefficient to highly train one person in…
Spreadsheets in financial markets are frequently used as database, calculator and reporting application combined. This paper describes an alternative approach in which spreadsheet design and database technology have been brought together in…
There have been many articles and mishaps published about the risks of uncontrolled spreadsheets in today's business environment, including non-compliance, operational risk, errors, and fraud all leading to significant loss events.…
Errors in spreadsheet applications and models are alarmingly common (some authorities, with justification cite spreadsheets containing errors as the norm rather than the exception). Faced with this body of evidence, the auditor can be faced…
This paper provides guidance to an analyst who wants to extract insight from a spreadsheet model. It discusses the terminology of spreadsheet analytics, how to prepare a spreadsheet model for analysis, and a hierarchy of analytical…
Modern spreadsheet systems can be used to implement complex spreadsheet applications including data sheets, customized user forms and executable procedures written in a scripting language. These applications are often developed by…
Selecting a subset of cells is a common task in data engineering, for example, to remove errors or select only specific parts of a table. Multiple approaches to express this selection exist. One option is numeric indexing, commonly found in…
A huge amount of data is everyday managed in large organizations in many critical business sectors with the support of spreadsheet applications. The process of elaborating spreadsheet data is often performed in a distributed, collaborative…
There is no free lunch, no single learning algorithm that will outperform other algorithms on all data. In practice different approaches are tried and the best algorithm selected. An alternative solution is to build new algorithms on demand…
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,…
Spreadsheets are known to be error-prone. Over the last decade, research has been done to determine the causes of the high rate of errors in spreadsheets. This paper examines the added value of a spreadsheet tool (PerfectXL) that visualizes…
This paper discusses the risks and potential impacts of spreadsheet errors in scientific research data in a Neuroscience research centre in the UK. Spreadsheets usage in neuroscience, or indeed any medical discipline, is a largely…