A spreadsheet usually starts as a simple and singleuser software artifact, but, as frequent as in other software systems, quickly evolves into a complex system developed by many actors. Often, different users work on different aspects of the same spreadsheet: while a secretary may be only involved in adding plain data to the spreadsheet, an accountant may define new business rules, while an eng...

Empirical studies of spreadsheet programming have commonly shown high over all error rates but much less attention has been paid to reasons for these errors. One often mentioned cause for errors is the low conceptual level of spreadsheet systems. By changing the conceptual level of spreadsheet system, we wanted to study whether this will produce different type of errors compared to traditional ...

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 techniques. These techniques include sensitivity analysis, tornado charts, and backsolving (or goal-seeking). This paper presents native-Excel approaches for automat...

This paper surveys what is known about the creation of spreadsheets, and presents some ideas to increase the productivity and effectiveness of spreadsheet simulations. I discuss spreadsheet errors, and present a spreadsheet engineering framework that supports critical examination of how you create and use your spreadsheet models. I summarize useful design recommendations, and briefly discuss th...

It is known that spreadsheets are error-prone. It is very difficult for users to get an overview of the design of the spreadsheet, and this is causing errors. Furthermore users are not always aware of the best way to structure a spreadsheet and just start modeling. To address this we will build a visual language to develop spreadsheet models. This enables users to visualize the design of their ...

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 way, where many actors enter data belonging to their local business domain to contribute to a global business view. The manual fusion of such data may lead t...