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It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel. If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone
by danielweber 12y ago
It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel.
If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone could write a tool to show all the calculations being performed to get to a result. I'm giving this idea away for free because I'm pretty sure someone has already done it.
Writing a new program from scratch has issues, too.
- mrcsparker 12y agoI have. Working on open sourcing the code right now.
- talkingquickly 12y agoI used to work in business modelling and a part of that was creating and auditing spreadsheets so complex they fell into the "this should never be a spreadsheet" category. There are several proprietary excel addons which are designed to do exactly this. Unhelpfully I can't remember the name of the ones I used but if you Google "Excel Auditing Tools" you get quite a few.
- filearts 12y agoA popular addon is the ACE toolkit. I'm sure that there are many more that may simply not be available for public consumption. I do financial modelling and our firm as developed its own formula auditing (and Excel Swiss Army knife) tool. For example, we can analyze a block of cells and have a visual overlay of which cells contain the same formulas, which cells contain formulas of different types (external file, external sheet, embedded constant, constant, etc..). This lets us really optimize our time while giving is more confidence that we have properly reviewed an entire spreadsheet.
- mutagen 12y agoSlate (https://www.useslate.com/ https://www.useslate.com/) is a relatively new product that does just that. Even the built in features like cell naming are little known and little used by many spreadsheet creators, leading to avoidable mistakes.