Comprehensive review for common types of errors using spreadsheets
This work addresses spreadsheet errors, a critical issue for business organizations and end users, but it is incremental as it reviews existing approaches rather than introducing new solutions.
This paper tackles the problem of errors in spreadsheets by conducting a comprehensive review that describes and classifies approaches for finding and fixing these errors, including discussing common user mistakes and up-to-date research methods.
Thanks to their flexibility and capability to perform different tasks and organize data in the best form and format, spreadsheets are widely used in different organizations and by different end users. Many business organizations rely on spreadsheets to fulfill their various tasks. On the other hand, the number of spreadsheets that contain errors are very high, thus researchers have developed different tools aimed at the prevention, detection, and correction of errors in spreadsheets. This research work is a comprehensive review that describes and classifies approaches on finding and fixing errors in spreadsheets. The paper discusses up-to-date research work approaches in terms of definition, how they work, and kinds of errors they can find in spreadsheets. The paper looks also for the kinds of errors that end users commonly make in spreadsheets.