Enron versus EUSES: A Comparison of Two Spreadsheet Corpora
This work provides insights into spreadsheet usage in business contexts, but it is incremental as it primarily compares existing datasets without introducing new methods or broad advancements.
The study compared the characteristics of spreadsheets from the Enron dataset and the EUSES corpus, finding that most spreadsheets are small with simple formulas and low coupling, and the two datasets are quite similar in these measured aspects.
Spreadsheets are widely used within companies and often form the basis for business decisions. Numerous cases are known where incorrect information in spreadsheets has lead to incorrect decisions. Such cases underline the relevance of research on the professional use of spreadsheets. Recently a new dataset became available for research, containing over 15.000 business spreadsheets that were extracted from the Enron E-mail Archive. With this dataset, we 1) aim to obtain a thorough understanding of the characteristics of spreadsheets used within companies, and 2) compare the characteristics of the Enron spreadsheets with the EUSES corpus which is the existing state of the art set of spreadsheets that is frequently used in spreadsheet studies. Our analysis shows that 1) the majority of spreadsheets are not large in terms of worksheets and formulas, do not have a high degree of coupling, and their formulas are relatively simple; 2) the spreadsheets from the EUSES corpus are, with respect to the measured characteristics, quite similar to the Enron spreadsheets.