Related papers: From Good Practices to Effective Policies for Prev…
This paper presents the findings of a case study of spreadsheet use in a higher education institution in the UK. The paper considers the use of spreadsheets in two units of the organisation, academic registry and finance. Spreadsheet use is…
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…
The spreadsheet has been used by the business community for many years and yet still raises a number of significant concerns. As educators our concern is to try to develop the students skills in both the development of spreadsheets and in…
Accounting and Finance (A&F) Professionals are arguably the most loyal and concentrated population of spreadsheet users. The work that they perform in spreadsheets has the most significant impact on financial data and business processes…
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,…
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…
Human error research on overconfidence supports the benefits of early visibility of defects and disciplined development. If risk to the enterprise is to be reduced, individuals need to become aware of the reality of the quality of their…
Although experts diverge on how best to improve spreadsheet quality, it is generally agreed that more time needs to be spent testing spreadsheets. Ideally, experienced and trained spreadsheet engineers would carry this out, but quite often…
In this paper we consider human factors and their impact on spreadsheet development in strategic decision-making. This paper brings forward research from many disciplines both directly related to spreadsheets and a broader spectrum from…
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…
This paper deals with errors in using spreadsheets and analysis of automatic recording of user interaction with spreadsheets. After a review of literature devoted to spreadsheet errors, we advocate the importance of going from error…
The risks of spreadsheet use do not just come from the misuse of formulae. As such, training needs to go beyond this technical aspect of spreadsheet use and look at the spreadsheet in its full business context. While standard training is by…
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…
Spreadsheets are one of the most widely used programming environments, and are widely deployed in domains like finance where errors can have catastrophic consequences. We present a static analysis specifically designed to find spreadsheet…
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…
Spreadsheet audit and review procedures are an essential part of almost all City of London financial transactions. Structured processes are used to discover errors in large financial spreadsheets underpinning major transactions of all…
One of the most important assets of any company is being able to easily access information on itself and on its business. In this line, it has been observed that this important information is often stored in one of the millions of…
System safety refers to a diverse engineering discipline assessing and improving various aspects of safety in socio-technical systems and their software-intensive sub-systems. While system safety has been a vital area of applied research…
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…
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…