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We intend to demonstrate the innate problems with existing spreadsheet products and to show how to tackle these issues using a new type of spreadsheet program called Resolver. It addresses the issues head-on and thereby moves the 1980's…
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…
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…
A spreadsheet is remarkably flexible in representing various forms of structured data, but the individual cells have no knowledge of the larger structures of which they may form a part. This can hamper comprehension and increase formula…
Developing an error-free spreadsheet has been a problem since the beginning of end-user computing. In this paper, we present a methodology that separates the modeling from the implementation. Using proven techniques from Information Systems…
Visualisation is often presented as a means of simplifying information and helping people understand complex data. In this paper we describe the design, development and evaluation of an interactive visualisation for spreadsheet formulae…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of the software engineering of a class of business spreadsheet models. A methodology for structured software development is proposed, which is based on structured analysis of data, represented as…
This paper extends a spreadsheet visualization technique by using layout information. The original approach identifies logically or semantically related cells by relying exclusively on the content of cells for identifying semantic classes.…
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…
A demonstration in MS Excel to show how users can connect their spreadsheet models to the external environment that the model represents. We employ indexes to generate a list of relevant evidence that is hyperlinked to the context in which…
Spreadsheets are widely used, and studies have shown that most end-user spreadsheets contain nontrivial errors. To improve end-users productivity, recent research proposes the use of a model-driven engineering approach to spreadsheets. In…
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…
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…
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…
Dimensions are an integral part of many models we use every day. Without thinking about it, we frequently use the time dimension: many financial and accounting spreadsheets have columns representing months or years. Representing a second…
In Part 1, we showed how to develop a conceptual model of a problem involving variables of multiple dimensions, like Products, Regions, Sectors and Months. The conceptual model is presented as a Formula Diagram, giving a global view of the…
Seasoned Excel developers were invited to participate in a challenge to implement a spreadsheet with multi-dimensional variables. We analyzed their spreadsheet to see the different implement strategies employed. We identified two…
Spreadsheet computing is one of the more popular computing methodologies in today's modern society. The spreadsheet application's ease of use and usefulness has enabled non-programmers to perform programming-like tasks in a familiar setting…
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…
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.…