Related papers: How do you know your spreadsheet is right?
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 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…
The traditional approach to spreadsheet auditing generally consists of auditing every distinct formula within a spreadsheet. Although tools are developed to support auditors during this process, the approach is still very time consuming and…
Traditional methods for identifying structurally similar spreadsheets fail to capture the spatial layouts and type patterns defining templates. To quantify spreadsheet similarity, we introduce a hybrid distance metric that combines semantic…
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…
Context: Tables are ubiquitous formats for data. Therefore, techniques for writing correct programs over tables, and debugging incorrect ones, are vital. Our specific focus in this paper is on rich types that articulate the properties of…
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…
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…
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…
Most organizations use large and complex spreadsheets that are embedded in their mission-critical processes and are used for decision-making purposes. Identification of the various types of errors that can be present in these spreadsheets…
Workbook-scale spreadsheet understanding is increasingly important for language-model-based data analysis agents, but remains challenging because relevant information is often distributed across multiple sheets with heterogeneous schemas,…
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…
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…
Spreadsheets often need changing in ways made tedious and risky by Excel. For example: simultaneously altering many tables' size, orientation, and position; inserting cross-tabulations; moving data between sheets; splitting and merging…
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…
Spreadsheets are a ubiquitous software tool, used for a wide variety of tasks such as financial modelling, statistical analysis and inventory management. Extracting meaningful information from such data can be a difficult task, especially…
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has finally forced corporations to examine the validity of their spreadsheets. They are beginning to understand the spreadsheet error literature, including what it tells them about the need for comprehensive…
Spreadsheet formula prediction has been an important program synthesis problem with many real-world applications. Previous works typically utilize input-output examples as the specification for spreadsheet formula synthesis, where each…
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 are used to develop application software that is distributed to users. Unfortunately, the users often have the ability to change the programming statements ("source code") of the spreadsheet application. This causes a host of…