Suppose you have some formula that computes a financial metric for your company. Someone you've shared it with drunkenly fat-fingers the formula 3/4 of the way down a long row, and that causes all entries below it to recompute with the wrong formula. Unless the change is really drastic, you may never know it happened.
And this sort of mistake -- basically a typo or a bad mouse movement -- happens daily in every company in the world in some spreadsheet. Often people will notice the mistake, but not with probability 1.
Software engineers have mechanisms to guard against some of these mistakes, and even we have a hard time getting people to take code review or tests seriously. What is the guard in the spreadsheet world?
Suppose you have some formula that computes a financial metric for your company. Someone you've shared it with drunkenly fat-fingers the formula 3/4 of the way down a long row, and that causes all entries below it to recompute with the wrong formula. Unless the change is really drastic, you may never know it happened.
And this sort of mistake -- basically a typo or a bad mouse movement -- happens daily in every company in the world in some spreadsheet. Often people will notice the mistake, but not with probability 1.
Software engineers have mechanisms to guard against some of these mistakes, and even we have a hard time getting people to take code review or tests seriously. What is the guard in the spreadsheet world?