Spreadsheets are powerful tools which play a business-critical role in many organizations. However, many bad decisions taken due to faulty spreadsheets show that these tools need serious quality assurance. Furthermore, while collaboration on spreadsheets for maintenance tasks is common, there has been almost no support for ensuring that the spreadsheets remain correct during this process. We be...

Spreadsheet workbook contents are simple programs. Because of this, probabilistic programming techniques can be used to perform Bayesian inversion of spreadsheet computations. What is more, existing execution engines in spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel can be made to do this using only built-in functionality. We demonstrate this by developing a native Excel implementation of bot...

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 reduces spreadsheet risk without overly restricting spreadsheet use. The method was developed in the course of several spreadsheet evaluation assignments fo...

Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name “Spreadsheet Standards Review Board”) have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering meth...

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 should ease the complex and mindblowing challenges of finding structures in a huge set of spreadsheet cells for building an adequate mental model of spreadsheet ...

Spreadsheets are computer programs. However, as with programs written in traditional programming languages, it is very difficult to understand a spreadsheet created by others. This is because spreadsheet users normally view the superficial numerical (value) view of spreadsheets although computations are specified through “hidden” cell formulas. The cell formulas also define the data-flow struct...

Spreadsheets are the most commonly used tool for end user development of applications, and organizations depend heavily upon them for decision making. This paper reports on a study to investigate the role of spreadsheet knowledge in the successful use of spreadsheet applications. It considers both the spreadsheet knowledge of the user developer and the spreadsheet knowledge of the user and test...

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 combination of goals, type of problem, and available time and resources. There is a lack of well-organized, proven methodologies with known costs and benefit...

This paper reports the results from a study on spreadsheet program use conducted in several departments within a city administration. Fourteen volunteer participants began the study by taking a two-day course on the spreadsheet program in question. The purpose of t.he project was to study spreadsheet program use longitudinally in a natural setting. That only three of the fourteen participants b...