Related papers: A Maintainability Checklist for Spreadsheets

A business case study on how three simple guidelines: 1. Make it easy to check (and maintain) 2. Make it safe to use 3. Keep business logic out of code changed user attitudes and improved spreadsheet quality in a financial services…

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…

Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by…

Spreadsheet collaboration provides valuable opportunities for learning and expertise sharing between colleagues. Sharing expertise is essential for the retention of important technical skillsets within organisations, but previous studies…

Heavy use of spreadsheets by organisations bears many potential risks such as errors, ambiguity, data loss, duplication, and fraud. In this paper these risks are briefly outlined along with their available mitigation methods such as:…

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…

Existing approaches for detecting anomalies in spreadsheets can help to discover faults, but they are often applied too late in the spreadsheet lifecycle. By contrast, our approach detects anomalies immediately whenever users change their…

Spreadsheets provide many of the key links between information systems, closing the gap between business needs and the capability of central systems. Recent regulations have brought these vulnerable parts of information supply chains into…

Recognizing that the use of spreadsheets within finance will likely not subside in the near future, this paper discusses a major barrier that is preventing more organizations from adopting enterprise spreadsheet management programs. But…

Past studies show that only a small percent of organizations implement and enforce formal rules or informal guidelines for the designing, testing, documenting, using, modifying, sharing and archiving of spreadsheet models. Due to lack of…

We present a pragmatic method for management of risks that arise due to spreadsheet use in large organizations. We combine peer-review, tool-assisted evaluation and other pre-existing approaches into a single organization-wide approach that…

We have conducted an empirical investigation into the long term survival rates of some small but representative samples of the 30,000 largest UK limited companies. These companies were either a control or known to have used, or been…

Previous research on spreadsheet risks has predominantly focussed on errors inadvertently introduced by spreadsheet writers i.e. it focussed on the end-user aspects of spreadsheet development. When analyzing a faulty spreadsheet, one might…

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…

Spreadsheet engineering methodologies are diverse and sometimes contradictory. It is difficult for spreadsheet developers to identify a spreadsheet engineering methodology that is appropriate for their class of spreadsheet, with its unique…

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous in business with the financial sector particularly heavily reliant on the technology. It is known that the level of spreadsheet error can be high and that it is often necessary to review spreadsheets based on a…

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…

The difference between surface and deep structures of a spreadsheet is a major cause of difficulty in checking spreadsheets. After a brief survey of current methods of checking (or debugging) spreadsheets, new visual methods of showing the…

This management summary provides an outline of a commercial spreadsheet review process. The aim of this process is to ensure remedial or enhancement work can safely be undertaken on a spreadsheet with a commercially acceptable level of risk…

Much of what EuSpRIG discusses is concerned with the integrity of individual spreadsheets. In businesses, interlocking spreadsheets are regularly used to fill functional gaps in core administrative systems. The growth and deployment of such…