4 ms·
I wondered if there might be a market for an Excel correctness checker. If billions are on the line, it might be worth a few bucks. But apparently Excel can adv
by neilk 14y ago
I wondered if there might be a market for an Excel correctness checker. If billions are on the line, it might be worth a few bucks. But apparently Excel can advise you of common problems like these already.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common-errors-in-formulas-HA010066323.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common-...
Probably that means such an add-on would not be sellable? However it wouldn't be the first time someone paid lots of money for something that software they owned already did just fine.
- danbruc 14y agoThere is probably not much you could check. You could probably do some type checking but beyond that I see - ad hoc - not much one could do. Excel does already catch syntax errors and a few other errors mentioned in the link. Maybe you could make these errors more prominent. But should we really encourage more development using office software? Shouldn't we solve the actual problem?
- qb45 14y agoThe hard part would be designing a machine-readable and illiterate-writable language for formal specification of Excel spreadsheet requirements to validate against. And getting said illiterates to use it. There is no other way to detect errors involving somebody using SUM instead of AVG or aggregating data from wrong fields (examples from the article).