Despite strong evidence of widespread errors, spreadsheet developers rarely subject their spreadsheets to post-development testing to reduce errors. This may be because spreadsheet developers are overconfident in the accuracy of their spreadsheets. This conjecture is plausible because overconfidence is present in a wide variety of human cognitive domains, even among experts. This paper describe...

Most spreadsheet surveys both for reporting use and error focus on the practical application of the spreadsheet in a particular industry. Typically these studies will illustrate that a particular percentage of spreadsheets are used for optimisation and a further percentage are used for ‘What if’ analysis. Much less common is examining the classes of function, as defined by the vendor, used by m...

Spreadsheet applications can nowadays be found nearly everywhere in companies and are used for a variety of purposes. Because of the high risk that arises when business decisions are based on faulty spreadsheets, in recent years new approaches for spreadsheet quality assurance have been proposed. Among them are techniques that allow for more intelligent tool support during the spreadsheet test ...

Programming requires years of training. With natural language and end user development methods, programming could become available to everyone. It enables end users to program their own devices and extend the functionality of the existing system without any knowledge of programming languages. In this paper, we describe an Interactive Spreadsheet Processing Module (ISPM), a natural language inte...

Despite being staggeringly error prone, spreadsheets can be viewed as a highly flexible end-users programming environment. As a consequence, spreadsheets are widely adopted for decision making by end-users, and may have a serious economical impact for the business. Hence, approaches for aiding the process of pinpointing the faulty cells in a spreadsheet are of great value. In this paper we pres...

Software refactoring is a well-known technique that provides transformations on software artifacts with the aim of improving their overall quality. In the past, we have proposed a catalog of refactorings for spreadsheet models expressed in the ClassSheets modeling language, which allows us to specify the business logic of a spreadsheet in an object-oriented fashion. Reasoning about spreadsheets...

Errors in a spreadsheet constitute a serious reason for concern among organizations as well as academics. There are ongoing efforts toward finding ways to reduce errors, designing and developing visualization tools to support error correction activities being one of them. In this paper, we propose a framework for classifying activities associated with spreadsheet error correction. The purpose o...

Spreadsheet software is the tool of choice for interactive ad-hoc data management, with adoption by billions of users. However, spreadsheets are not scalable, unlike database systems. On the other hand, database systems, while highly scalable, do not support interactivity as a first-class primitive. We are developing DATASPREAD, to holistically integrate spreadsheets as a frontend interface wit...

BACKGROUND The process for data collection in multicenter trials may be troublesome and expensive. We report our experience with the spreadsheet function in Googledocs for this purpose. METHODS In Googledocs the data manager creates a form similar to the paper case record form, which will function as a decentral data entry module. When the forms are submitted, they are presented in a spreadsh...

F or many tasks involving Fourier analysis, a spreadsheet is an excellent tool. Using examples, this article shows that for data sets involving perhaps a hundred points and a few tens of coefficients, a spreadshe& method is practical and quick on perwnal computers such as the Macintosh SE or the IBM PC AT and compatibles. With enhanced hardware such as floating-point co-pmcaasor chips, the numb...