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That is certainly something that I have seen as well. The problem lies in validating the spreadsheets. Often, the amount of validation is minimal, whether that

That is certainly something that I have seen as well. The problem lies in validating the spreadsheets. Often, the amount of validation is minimal, whether that is the actual formulae used or the relationships that bare created or even the data that is used. I have seen some outstanding examples of well written spreadsheets but these tend to be the minority case. Depending on the organisation and the priority it puts on validation, the spreadsheets can range in quality from vry poor to mediocre. I have seen critical spreadsheets that were a disaster of coding. Many times, the IT costs for getting the IT developers to do the work for you is so far above what it costs for you to do it yourself or even to get a developer in specifically to work for you, outside of any controls that your IT group would exert. Plenty of the work I have done in the last 20 years was based on the end-user employing me to do the work taht was not cost effective or even allowed for by the company IT teams.

rightbyte 8y ago
Is validation a problem? You see the intermediate steps of calculation in the columns. It's way more clear then black-box unit testing. It's like some nice live debugging with print statements everywhere.
- oldandtired 8y ago
  Validation is always a problem. In one early example, I came across, the core data on which the model did not match what was really there. The data was assumed to be correct and, of course, nobody actually did the checking. The previous year's data was used for the following year's calculations. I knew the data for the spreadsheet was wrong only because I had been involved in looking at the actual data sources in weeks previously. But there can also be formulae errors. They seem to produce the correct information, but they will have subtle errors that miss necessary edge cases or use set values when they shouldn't.

rightbyte 8y ago

Is validation a problem? You see the intermediate steps of calculation in the columns. It's way more clear then black-box unit testing. It's like some nice live debugging with print statements everywhere.

oldandtired 8y ago
Validation is always a problem. In one early example, I came across, the core data on which the model did not match what was really there. The data was assumed to be correct and, of course, nobody actually did the checking. The previous year's data was used for the following year's calculations. I knew the data for the spreadsheet was wrong only because I had been involved in looking at the actual data sources in weeks previously. But there can also be formulae errors. They seem to produce the correct information, but they will have subtle errors that miss necessary edge cases or use set values when they shouldn't.