Transparency measures in Excel

Transparency is important to auditors and to those who commission models because the less transparent a model is the longer it takes to audit and the more it costs to deliver.

I have never seen a 'transparency' measure yet modelers claim one method is more transparent than another. How do they know? The short answer is, they don't because no one, that I know of, measures model transparency.

This article proposes a metric for Excel model transparency. A model's transparency is the sum of components for:

• Constants. To measure a constant's transparency we count the minimum number of steps required to find its LABEL (meaning).
• References. To measure a reference's transparency we count the minimum number of steps required to find its VALUE and LABEL.
• Formulas. To understand any formula we must understand its references, its operators, and its functions.