Related papers: Auditing spreadsheets: With or without a tool?
Spreadsheets offer a supremely successful and intuitive means of processing and exchanging numerical content. Its intuitive ad-hoc nature makes it hugely popular for use in diverse areas including business and engineering, yet these very…
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…
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…
In recent years, discussions about fairness in machine learning, AI ethics and algorithm audits have increased. Many entities have developed framework guidance to establish a baseline rubric for fairness and accountability. However, in…
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…
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…
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…
The prevalent usage of open-source software (OSS) has led to an increased interest in resolving potential third-party security risks by fixing common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). However, even with automated code analysis tools in…
Auditors demand financial models be transparent yet no consensus exists on what that means precisely. Without a clear modeling transparency definition we cannot know when our models are "transparent". The financial modeling community…
Spreadsheets are critical to data-centric tasks, with rich, structured layouts that enable efficient information transmission. Given the time and expertise required for manual spreadsheet layout design, there is an urgent need for automated…
Various techniques for developing spreadsheet models greatly improve the chance that the end result will not contain basic mechanical errors. However, for every discipline in which a given technique is useful, there is likely to be another…
We consider the challenge of creating guidelines to evaluate the quality of a spreadsheet model. We suggest four principles. First, state the domain-the spreadsheets to which the guidelines apply. Second, distinguish between the process by…
Spreadsheets are used extensively within today's organisations. Although spreadsheets have many benefits, they can also present a significant risk exposure, requiring appropriate management. Protiviti has worked with a number of…
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…
Large Language Models (LLM) have become sophisticated enough that complex computer programs can be created through interpretation of plain English sentences and implemented in a variety of modern languages such as Python, Java Script, C++…
We report on the development of a general tool called ExSched, implemented as a plug-in for Microsoft Excel, for solving a class of constraint satisfaction problems. The traditional spreadsheet paradigm is based on attaching arithmetic…
Monte Carlo (MC) simulation includes a wide range of stochastic techniques used to quantitatively evaluate the behavior of complex systems or processes. Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) software is,…
Spreadsheets have been with us in their present form for over a quarter of a century. We have become so used to them that we forget that we are using them at all. It may serve us well to stand back for a moment to review where, when and how…
Principles, Techniques and Practice of Spreadsheet Style
A central challenge in science is to understand how systems behaviors emerge from complex networks. This often requires aggregating, reusing, and integrating heterogeneous information. Supplementary spreadsheets to articles are a key data…