Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 11, 2013

Spreadsheets:… [95% Usage]

Filed under: Documentation,Spreadsheets,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:57 pm

Spreadsheets: The Ununderstood Dark Matter of IT by Felienne Hermans.

Description:

Spreadsheets are used extensively in industry: they are the number one tool for financial analysis and are also prevalent in other domains, such as logistics and planning. Their flexibility and immediate feedback make them easy to use for non-programmers. But they are as easy to build, as they are difficult to analyze, maintain and check. Felienne’s research aims at developing methods to support spreadsheet users to understand, update and improve spreadsheets. Inspiration was taken from classic software engineering, as this field is specialized in the analysis of data and calculations. In this talk Felienne will summarize her recently completed PhD research on the topic of spreadsheet structure visualization, spreadsheet smells and clone detection, as well as presenting a sneak peek into the future of spreadsheet research as Delft University.

Some tidbits to interest you in the video:

“95% of all U.S. corporations still use spreadsheets.”

“Spreadsheet can have a long life, 5 years on average.”

“No docs, errors, long life. It looks like software!”

Designing a tool for software users are using, as opposed to designing tools users ought to be using.

What a marketing concept!

Not a lot of details at the PerfectXL website.

PerfectXL analyzes spreadsheets but doesn’t address the inability of spreadsheets to capture robust metadata about data or its processing in a spreadsheet.

Pay particular attention to how Felienne distinguishes a BI dashboard from a spreadsheet. You have seen that before in this blog. (Hint: Search for “F-16” or “VW.”)

No doubt you will also like Felienne’s blog.

I first saw this in a tweet by Lars Marius Garshol.

1 Comment

  1. […] in mind those 2.5 million spreadsheets that Felienne mentions in her […]

    Pingback by Hadoop – 100x Faster… [With NO ETL!] « Another Word For It — November 11, 2013 @ 8:32 pm

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