There has been an annual conference in London for quite a number of years all about spreadsheet mistakes and how to avoid disaster. A few years ago, some entrepreneurs from resolversystems.com built a better spreadsheet named resolver-one specifically to address the problems of the financial services industry. Essentially what it does is write code while you build a spreadsheet model. Then, when you recalculate, it runs the code. Once a model is built, it can be passed on to professional software developers to QA the code, document it, refactor it and build proper unit tests. However the spreadsheet model still appears to end users just like a normal spreadsheet model. I think this is the real solution to this problem. Use Excel to play around with numbers and do one-off analyses, but for serious business rely on a tool like Resolver One.
I think the main issue has always been that "The Business" -- that nebulous, supposedly all-knowing corporate entity -- never wanted their employees to rely on a spreadsheets stuck on somebody's shared network drive. The issue has never been "formalisation" -- we already have tools for that, though they could surely do with improvement -- but the ad hoc nature that is, over time, festooned with more and more features or blessed as the Official way of doing something -- and when that happens, it's not going anywhere; it's too late to change.
Resolver One was a great idea, but it has been discontinued:
"But while many people did buy Resolver One, we struggled to turn it into a commercial success. The vast majority of people are happy with either Microsoft Excel, or one of the free alternatives available from Google and the like. Since mid-2011, all of our development focus has been on a new product, PythonAnywhere."
That's the annual conference of the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group, always noted for the lively debates between academic researchers and hardened practitioners.
