What you understand is what you get: Assessment in Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. In previous work we have studied how an explicit representation of the background knowledge associated with the spreadsheet can be exploited to alleviate usability problems with spreadsheet-based applications. The SACHS system implements this approach to provide a semantic help system for DCS, an Excelbased financial controlling system. In this paper, we evaluate the coverage of the SACHS system with a “Wizard of Oz” experiment and see that while SACHS fares much better than DCS alone, it systematically misses important classes of explanations. We provide a first approach for an “assessment module” in SACHS, that assists the user in judging the situation modeled by the data in the spreadsheets and possibly remedying shortcomings.