Related papers: Spreadsheets - the Good, the Bad and the Downright…
All users of spreadsheets struggle with the problem of errors. Errors are thought to be prevalent in spreadsheets, and in some instances they have cost organizations millions of dollars. In a previous study of 50 operational spreadsheets we…
Spreadsheets are the go-to tool for computerized calculation and modelling, but are hard to comprehend and adapt after reaching a certain complexity. In general, cognition of complex systems is facilitated by having a higher order mental…
The spreadsheet application is among the most widely used computing tools in modern society. It provides excellent usability and usefulness, and it easily enables a non-programmer to perform programming-like tasks in a visual tabular "pen…
The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread. Companies base decisions on information coming from spreadsheets. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are error-prone and this increases the risk that companies base their decisions on inaccurate…
I revisit some classic publications on modularity, to show what problems its pioneers wanted to solve. These problems occur with spreadsheets too: to recognise them may help us avoid them.
At face value, this essay is about understanding a fairly esoteric governance tool called compute thresholds. However, in order to grapple with whether these thresholds will achieve anything, we must first understand how they came to be. To…
Contemporary spreadsheets are plagued by a profusion of errors, auditing difficulties, lack of uniform development methodologies, and barriers to easy comprehension of the underlying business models they represent. This paper presents a…
Modern ERP systems contain flexible report generators but the tendency exists for users to export data to spreadsheets for manipulation, reporting and decision making. A purported reason for this is that some users are more familiar with…
The quality of the data in spreadsheets is less discussed than the structural integrity of the formulas. Yet it is an area of great interest to the owners and users of the spreadsheet. This paper provides an overview of Information Quality…
Software is a unique entity that has laid a strong impact on all other fields either related or not related to software. These include medical, scientific, business, educational, defence, transport, telecommunication to name a few.…
Whilst not all spreadsheet defects are structural in nature, poor layout choices can compromise spreadsheet quality. These defects may be avoided at the development stage by some simple mistake prevention and detection devices. Poka-Yoke…
Legacy spreadsheets are both, an asset, and an enduring problem concerning spreadsheets in business. To make spreadsheets stay alive and remain correct, comprehension of a given spreadsheet is highly important. Visualization techniques…
This paper presents a taxonomy for analytical spreadsheet models. It considers both the use case that a spreadsheet is meant to serve, and the engineering resources devoted to its development. We extend a previous three-type taxonomy, to…
A new MS Excel application has been developed which seeks to reduce the risks associated with the development, operation and auditing of Excel spreadsheets. FormulaDataSleuth provides a means of checking spreadsheet formulas and data as…
Cloud Computing has caused a paradigm shift in the world of computing. Several use case scenarios have been floating around the programming world in relation to this. Applications such as Spreadsheets have the capability to use the Cloud…
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,…
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 task of interest in machine learning (ML) is that of ascribing explanations to the predictions made by ML models. Furthermore, in domains deemed high risk, the rigor of explanations is paramount. Indeed, incorrect explanations can and…
Refactoring is a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behaviour. A database refactoring is a small change to the database schema which…
Research on formulae production in spreadsheets has established the practice as high risk yet unrecognised as such by industry. There are numerous software applications that are designed to audit formulae and find errors. However these are…