Authors
Bas Jansen & Felienne Hermans
Abstract
It is known that spreadsheets are error-prone. It is very diffcult for users to get an overview of the design of the spreadsheet, and this is causing errors. Furthermore users are not always aware of the best way to structure a spreadsheet and just start modeling.
To address this we will build a visual language to develop spreadsheet models. This enables users to visualize the design of their spreadsheets.
A spreadsheet generator will create the spreadsheet based on the specifications made with our visual language. During this process, best practices for structuring spreadsheets are automatically incorporated. There will be a bidirectional link between the model and the associated spreadsheet.
Sample
The basis for our proposed user interface is a visual language.
There are several hypotheses underpinning the proposed solution that will be evaluated during the research:
- Users are more likely to use a visual language than a written language as an alternative to develop a spreadsheet.
- The representation of a spreadsheet in the visual language will help users to get an overall overview of the spreadsheet.
- If the user has a better overall overview of the spreadsheet, the spreadsheet will contain fewer errors.
- The automatic spreadsheet generator will use common design patterns to structure the data in a spreadsheet. This will improve the underlying design of the spreadsheets.
- A better structured spreadsheet contains fewer errors.
Publication
2014, First Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets,
