Two Corpuses of Spreadsheet Errors

The widespread presence of errors in spreadsheets is now well-established. Quite a few methodological and software approaches have been suggested as ways to reduce spreadsheet errors. However, these approaches are always tailored to particular types of errors. Are such errors, in fact, widespread? A tool that focuses on rare errors is not very appealing. In other fields of error analysis, especially linguistics, it has proven useful to collect corpuses (systematic samples) of errors. This paper presents two corpuses of errors seen in spreadsheet experiments. Hopefully, these corpuses will help us assess the claims of spreadsheet reduction approaches and should guide theory creation and testing.