validating the unit correctness of spreadsheet programs
Financial companies, engineering firms and even scientistscreate increasingly larger spreadsheets and spreadsheetprograms. The creators of large spreadsheets makeerrors and must track them down. One common class oferrors concerns unit errors, because spreadsheets often employformulas with physical or monetary units.In this paper, we describe XeLda, our tool for unit checkingExcel spreadsheets. The tool highlights cells if theirformulas process values with incorrect units and if derivedunits clash with unit annotations. In addition, it draws arrowsto the sources of the formulas for debugging. The toolis sensitive to many of the intricacies of Excel spreadsheetsincluding tables, matrices, and even circular references.Using XeLda, we have detected errors in some publishedscientific spreadsheets.
correctness spreadsheet program engine errors tracking class physical paper tool process values annotation debugging sensitive tables