Authors
Chris Chambers & Martin Erwig
Abstract
We present a reasoning system for inferring dimension information in spreadsheets. This system can be used to check the consistency of spreadsheet formulas and can be employed to detect errors in spreadsheets.
We have prototypically implemented the system as an add-in to Excel.
In an evaluation of this implementation we were able to detect dimension errors in almost 50% of the investigated spreadsheets, which shows that:
- The system works reliably in practice.
- Dimension information can be well exploited to uncover errors in spreadsheets.
Sample
The occurrence of dimensions in the spreadsheets from the EUSES corpus containing formulas is detailed in this table.
We found that certain headers were more prevalent than others and had a greater impact.
For example, for the quantity money, the two most common results were "Dollars" and "Money", with 201 and 159 occurrences, respectively.
For the quantity time, the results were distributed more evenly, with the most common, "Year", occurring 91 times and the least common, "Month", occurring 28 times.
Publication
2008, Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, September, pages 123-130
