Authors
Felienne Hermans
Abstract
Spreadsheets are used extensively in industry: they are the number one tool for financial analysis and are also prevalent in other domains, such as logistics and planning. Their flexibility and immediate feedback make them easy to use for non-programmers.
But as easy as spreadsheets are to build, so difficult can they be to analyze and adapt. This dissertation aims at developing methods to support spreadsheet users to understand, update and improve spreadsheets. We took our inspiration for such methods from software engineering, as this field is specialized in the analysis of data and calculations.
In this dissertation, we have looked at four different aspects of spreadsheets: metadata, structure, formulas and data. We found that methods from software engineering can be applied to spreadsheets very well, and that these methods support end-users in working with spreadsheets.
Sample
The Plimpton 322, a Babylonian tablet from 1800 BC, lists the Pythagorean triplets in a very spreadsheet-like form. In common with most spreadsheets, this tablet has a copy-paste error: one of the numbers in row 9 actually belongs in row 8.
Publication
2012, Ph.D thesis, Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group
Full article
Analyzing and visualizing spreadsheets
