

What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors (2008) - dredmorbius
http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm

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eddyparkinson
1) Thoughts, this seams to be a bit of a brick wall, it gets lots of research
papers published, but proposed solutions never seam to hit mainstream
spreadsheet users.

2) Web App Builder for spreadsheet users. Surprisingly, it has a lot more
power than other app builders.
[http://www.cellmaster.com.au/AppBuilder.html](http://www.cellmaster.com.au/AppBuilder.html)
(just something I am working on, your thoughts?)

~~~
dredmorbius
Behavioral change is hard. Spreadsheets are like PHP but worse: they're a
good-enough solution aimed at the not only technologically illiterate and
underserved (why use a spreadsheet if you've got access to a decent
development tool ... oh, it's because you _don 't have_ the development tool,
and you _aren 't allowed to obtain it_), as well as the technophobic: those
who don't see a spreadsheet as "programming" when in fact it actually is.

Spreadsheets are _very_ easy to start and extend, but they reach levels of
high technical debt quickly. And any of the various tools for addressing the
challenges of spreadsheet error proliferation tend to require tools, skills,
access, and/or permissions which the very development base of spreadsheets are
unlikely to have.

On your site: provide a more appealing landing page:

• Light background, dark text. Always.

• _TELL ME WHAT IT IS!!!_

• Fix your stylesheet / page coding. Your "Spreadsheets formulas that build
web applications" header is coded with 1) inline styles that 2) combine px and
em dimensions and results in 3) lines which overlap. If I've got to pull out
an element inspector _just to read your site_ you're doing it wrong.

• Your "About" page doesn't tell me what Cell Master actually _is_ or more
importantly what it _does_ and most importantly _which of my problems it
solves and how_. As a senior level technical lead trying to find solutions for
internal problems, I'm going to skip over that really fast. And the page
remains difficult to read without 1) javascript and 2) Element Inspector
deployed. Fix that.

What do I think? Not much.

