Beyond The Desktop Spreadsheet

Hypernumbers is a new commercial web-based spreadsheet. It addresses several risk factors in deploying spreadsheets. Traditional risk management of spreadsheets has focused on run-time risk incorrect formulae, accidental overwriting of formula, unapproved adaption of the spreadsheets structure by an unapproved person and so on. The sources and lifecycles of spreadsheet errors are by now quite well known Current risk management has three major mechanisms to address risk. Firstly, to instrument spreadsheets using their scripting capabilities to impose certain behaviours on them. Secondly, to minimize risk by using operating procedures and standards which are shown to be less error-prone that ad-hoc spreadsheet development methods. These are training intensive and hard to police. Thirdly, to inspect and audit spreadsheets in operation. Hypernumbers is attempting to address spreadsheet risk in two radically new ways. The core approach is not to mitigate risk but to engineer out risky activities. The curtilage of the spreadsheet has been extended to include much of the operational environment in which conventional spreadsheets are used. This process absorbs and subsumes much of the ‘best practice’ and end-user disciplines that are conventionally used to address risk. Traditional spreadsheets have no clear barrier between data and programme instructions – in the Turing sense – or between input data and output information. Hypernumbers enables those barriers to be simply and reliably re-imposed, thus draining off a whole category of run-time errors. This separation allows spreadsheet usage to be split into two distinct phases – development, where audit and testing can reduce errors, and deployment, where what would be risky practices in other spreadsheet paradigms are simply engineered out. Using these techniques, ‘applications’ consisting of 10,000+ spreadsheets used by tens of users can be, and have been, safely built. 1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPREADSHEETS Spreadsheets arose in the swansong days of the mainframe and really exploded only with the rise of personal computer [ROIZEN, 2010]. The run-time environment was unnetworked personal computers in a single user mode. The early spreadsheet war was decisively won by Microsoft Excel, and the second phase began – a battle between proprietary software and the open source spreadsheets. This