The Spreadsheet CPU simulates a central processing unit for teaching purposes. The simulator provides interactive instruction execution like the “Little Man Computer,” the LC-3, and other simulators, but it is not a stand-alone program. Instead, it is implemented atop an off-the-shelf copy of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet cells make it easy for students to observe the simulat...

Spreadsheets are first-order functional languages and are widely used in research and industry as a tool to conveniently perform all kinds of computations. Because cells on a spreadsheet are immutable, there are possibilities for implicit parallelization of spreadsheet computations. In this literature study, we provide an overview of the publications on spreadsheet end-user programming and decl...

“Spreadsheet simulation” refers to the use of a spreadsheet as a platform for representing simulation models and performing the simulation experiment. This tutorial explains the reasons for using this platform for simulation, discusses why this is frequently an efficient way to build simulation models and execute them, describes how to setup a spreadsheet simulation, and finally suggests when a...

The traditional approach to spreadsheet auditing generally consists of auditing every distinct formula within a spreadsheet. Although tools are developed to support auditors during this process, the approach is still very time consuming and therefore relatively expensive. As an alternative to the traditional 'control through' approach, this paper discusses a 'control around' approach. Within th...

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 and Software Engineering, we develop strict, but simple, rules governing the implementation from the model. The resulting spreadsheet should be easier to un...

Our term "structure discovery" denotes the recovery of structure, such as the grouping of cells, that was intended by a spreadsheet’s author but is not explicit in the spreadsheet. We are implementing structurediscovery tools in the logic-programming language Prolog for our spreadsheet analysis program Model Master, by writing grammars for spreadsheet structures. The objective is an "intelligen...

We present a tool called Gneiss that extends the familiar spreadsheet model to support creating data-drive web applications that use data from the Internet. Gneiss allows the user to extract data from arbitrary REST web services to a spreadsheet and send spreadsheet data to web services dynamically without writing conventional code. It provides new spreadsheet functions and interface elements t...

This chapter describes two experiments that examined overconfidence in spreadsheet development. Overconfidence has been seen widely in spreadsheet development and could account for the rarity of testing by end-user spreadsheet developers. The first experiment studied a new way of measuring overconfidence. It demonstrated that overconfidence really is strong among spreadsheet developers. The sec...

Spreadsheets are important business tools. Increasingly they are being used for simulation e.g. to perform risk analysis. Such tasks have far greater computational demands than traditional spreadsheet bookkeeping applications. In this paper we show how spreadsheets can support supercomputing. This is achieved without requiring the spreadsheet user to have specialist tools or knowledge. The key ...