Authors
Chris Chambers & Christopher Scaffidi
Abstract
Spreadsheets have become one of the most widely-adopted software technologies. They have proven useful for performing numeric computations as well as for organizing, manipulating, exploring, and visualizing data. Yet only one aspect of spreadsheets, formulas, has received extensive attention in field studies to date.
In this paper, we describe a three-part field study that widens this focus to uncover a broader range of challenges that people encounter when creating and using spreadsheets. This study has revealed several opportunities to improve spreadsheet editors, including developing different modes for spreadsheet creation, improving support for spreadsheet reuse, and helping users to find and use features.
Sample
We analyzed 200 randomly-selected threads from a "General Excel" online forum in order to learn what problems users complain about.
We found seven categories of user problems:
- 'Problem setup' covers difficulties before users even know what features are needed.
- 'Feature finding' deals with locating features in the user interface.
- The other five categories related to actually using or configuring certain kinds of features.
Publication
2010, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, September, pages 187-194
Full article
Struggling to excel: A field study of challenges faced by spreadsheet users
