Authors
Dimitrios Maditinos, Dimitrios Chatzoudes, & Charalampos Tsairidis
Abstract
The personal computers era made advanced programming tasks available to end users. Spreadsheet models are one of the most widely used applications that can produce valuable results with minimal training and effort. However, errors contained in most spreadsheets may be catastrophic and difficult to detect.
This study attempts to investigate the influence of experience and spreadsheet presentation on the error finding performance by end users. To reach the target of the study, 216 business and finance students participated in a task of finding errors in a simple free cash flow model.
The findings of the study reveal that presentation of the spreadsheet is of major importance as far as the error finding performance is concerned, while experience does not seem to affect students on their performance. Further research proposals and limitations of the study are, moreover, discussed.
Sample
Our example spreadsheet was delivered in five distinct forms, each including eight errors. Students had the most success finding the errors when they could see the values and point the cursor at each cell to see the formula ("Excel With Values").
Publication
2012, Business, Management and Education, Volume 10, Number 1, pages 128-143
