Authors
Tudor Antoniu, Paul A. Steckler, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Erich Neuwirth, & Matthias Felleisen
Abstract
Financial companies, engineering firms and even scientists create increasingly larger spreadsheets and spreadsheet programs.
The creators of large spreadsheets make errors and must track them down. One common class of errors concerns unit errors, because spreadsheets often employ formulas with physical or monetary units.
In this paper, we describe XeLda, our tool for unit checking Excel spreadsheets. The tool highlights cells if their formulas process values with incorrect units and if derived units clash with unit annotations.
In addition, it draws arrows to the sources of the formulas for debugging. The tool is sensitive to many of the intricacies of Excel spreadsheets including tables, matrices, and even circular references. Using XeLda, we have detected errors in some published scientific spreadsheets.
Sample
This figure shows a XeLda-analyzed spreadsheet with a textual explanation display and all the source arrows drawn.
There are two errors:
- Cell B5 is the product of cells A2 and C2. There is a mismatch between the unit computed for B5 and its annotation.
- Cell B12 attempts to compare apples (from cell A9) with oranges (from cell C9).
In both errors, the arrows indicate the sources of data for the erroneous cell.
Publication
2004, 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, May, pages 439-448
