Authors
Stephen G. Powell, Kenneth R. Baker, & Barry Lawson
Abstract
Errors are prevalent in spreadsheets and can be extremely difficult to find. A number of audits of existing spreadsheets have been reported, but few details have been given about how the audits were performed.
We developed and tested a new spreadsheet auditing protocol designed to find errors in operational spreadsheets. Our work showed which auditing procedures, used in what sequence and combination, were most effective across a wide range of spreadsheets.
It also provided useful information on the size and complexity of operational spreadsheets, as well as the frequency with which certain types of errors occur.
Sample
In 3 of the 50 spreadsheets audited we did not find any errors of the types in our auditing protocol. In the remaining 47 we found a total of 483 instances of errors involving a total of 4855 error cells.
This figure shows how the error instances were distributed by error type.
Publication
2008, Information & Management, Volume 45, Issue 5, July, pages 312-320
