Supporting Spreadsheet Maintenance with Dependency Notification

Abstract

Spreadsheets in the industry are used by multiple employees in organizations, and they remain in use for several years. Maintenance of existing spreadsheets is thus common. One of the issues in maintaining spreadsheets is the fact that formulas create cell dependencies, and these dependencies are invisible to users. To address this, dependence tracing techniques have been developed, both commercially and in research. However, these techniques are effort consuming, and are designed as separate activities that force the users to leave the context of editing spreadsheets. As such, these techniques are not suitably supportive for usual spreadsheet maintenance tasks. In this extended abstract, we present our work in progress on a novel approach for notifying users of cell dependencies, integrated into the context of editing spreadsheets. We present a preliminary evaluation of the approach in the form of an exploratory user-study with seven employees of a financial modeling company. Results show that the approach has the potential to support industrial spreadsheet users in the context of spreadsheet maintenance, as indicated by the responses of six out of seven participants.