The Effect of a Block-based Language on Formula Comprehension in Spreadsheets

The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread. It is known that spreadsheets have an average life span of five years, and during this life span, they are used on average by thirteen different persons. Consequently, spreadsheets need maintenance, and knowledge about the spreadsheet needs to be transferred from one user to another. To minimize...

XLBlocks: a Block-based Formula Editor for Spreadsheet Formulas

Spreadsheets are frequently used in industry to support critical business decisions. Unfortunately, they also suffer from error-proneness, which sometimes results in costly consequences. Experiments in the field of program education have shown that programmers tend to make fewer errors and can better focus on the logic of a program if they use a...

The use of Charts, Pivot Tables, and Array Formulas in two Popular Spreadsheet Corpora

The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread. Companies base decisions on information coming from spreadsheets. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are error-prone and this increases the risk that companies base their decisions on inaccurate information, which can lead to incorrect decisions and loss of money. In general, spreadsheet research is...

Detecting and Predicting Evolution in Spreadsheets: A Case Study in an Energy Network Company

The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread and the information that they provide is often used for decisions. Research has shown that spreadsheets are error-prone, leading to the risk that decisions are made on incorrect information. Software Evolution is a well-researched topic and the results have proven to support developers in...

Detecting Problematic Lookup Functions in Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are used heavily in many business domains around the world. They are easy to use and as such enable end-user programmers to and build and maintain all sorts of reports and analyses. In addition to using spreadsheets for modeling and calculation, spreadsheets are often also used for creating reports and dashboards: combining data...

Using a visual language to create better spreadsheets

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 spread- sheet and just start modeling. To address this we will build a visual language to develop spreadsheet models...