A Platform for Spreadsheet Composition

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 to errors in copy-paste operations, loss of alignment and coherency due to multiple spreadsheet copies in circulation, as well as loss of data due to broken cross-spreadsheet links. In this paper we describe a methodology, based on a Spreadsheet Composition Platform, which greatly reduces these risks. The proposed platform seamlessly integrates the distributed spreadsheet elaboration, supports the commonly known spreadsheet tools for data processing and helps organizations to adopt a more controlled and secure environment for data fusion. 1 RISKS IN DISTRIBUTED SPREADSHEET COLLABORATIVE DATA PROCESSING Companies and organizations in many critical business areas base many of their most critical data processing tasks on spreadsheet applications [1][2]. The reasons why this happens have been investigated and researched by the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group, as well as many of the potential risks associated with the use of spreadsheets in these processes [3][4]. Some of these risks are due to bad practices or lack of control in the development phase of the spreadsheets by the End Users [5], but many risks are also hidden in the run-time processing of data contained in distributed spreadsheets [6]. In many large organizations spreadsheet-based data processing often takes place in a distributed, collaborative way, where many actors produce or consume spreadsheet-based data and contribute to the setup of a real spreadsheet-based “distributed workflow”. The propagation and the update of data in this workflow is commonly performed either using the tools provided by spreadsheet applications (like cross-spreadsheet links) or using manual techniques, like copy and paste operations over spreadsheets. Access to spreadsheet data is also not controlled, allowing different methods like concurrent access by different actors to a shared location or circulation of spreadsheets by email. The combinations of these practices may lead to errors and/or inefficiencies, the most common of which can be summarized as follows: • inconsistent cross-spreadsheet links due to uncontrolled delete/rename/replace operations of spreadsheet files potentially leads to data loss;