Strategies and visualization tools for enhancing user auditing of spreadsheet models

Spreadsheets are very widely used at various levels of the organization. St udies have shown that errors do occur frequently during the development of spreadsheet models. Empirical studies of operational spreadsheet models sho w that a large percentage of them contain errors. However, the identificati on of errors is difficult and tedious, and errors have led to drastically w rong decisions. It is thus important to develop new strategies and auditing tools for detecting errors. A suite of new auditing visualization tools ha ve been designed and implemented in Visual Basic for Application (VBA), as an add-in module for easy inclusion in any Excel 97 or Excel 2000 installat ion. Furthermore, four strategies are proposed for detecting errors. These range from an overview strategy to identify logical components of the sprea dsheet model, to specific strategies targeted at specific types of error. I llustrations show how these strategies can be supported with the new visual ization tools. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.